When we said goodbye to “Windows Live” today, it wasn’t the only rebranding announcement to come out of Microsoft recently: yesterday Microsoft Advertising rebranded itself to “Bing”, or “Bing for Small Business”. And of course, being Microsoft, the rebranding has to be a lot more complicated than that, and it is. For small and medium businesses, if you want to advertise on Bing, you use Bing for Small Business (or, if you prefer the more confusing title: Bing). But if you are a large business, or more concisely a “Marketer or Agency”, then there hasn’t been a rebrand at all, never you mind, it’s still “Microsoft Advertising”. Got that? Good (now perhaps you can explain it to us!). You can learn more about Bing for Small Business and how to use adCenter to manage advertising on Bing and Yahoo!, or check out Microsoft Advertising if you’re one of the big boys.
Not to be outdone, Xbox’s illustrious Major Nelson (Larry Hyrb), announced today on his blog that “Inside Xbox”, a collection of news, game tips, and tutorials available through the Xbox Video hub while signed in to Xbox Live, is coming to an end. But wait! It’s way more complicated than that! Major Nelson “explains”:
Consequently, we’ve decided to discontinue production of Inside Xbox in the United States, and as a result this content will also no longer be available in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Xbox LIVE in EMEA is currently looking at its operating model for Inside Xbox. This could potentially result in some changes, but we have no news here to share yet. Xbox LIVE in Mexico and Japan will continue to produce first-party content for its members via other media outside of the Inside Xbox brand.
We’ll just go ahead and say right here that we’re sticking with “LiveSide.net”, no matter what happens. All these name changes are giving us a headache!