@Marko Thanks for commenting. First of all, this site wasn't created by Microsoft. It was a weekend project by three guys who thought it'd be a funny parody.

You ask the question (paraphrasing), "Why do we need this?".

Why get upset about it? Let the market decide. If it's not for you, don't visit the site. It's a principle called the law of two feet. Many people felt the same way about Twitter (Why do we need this!). Apparently, there are people who do like it. Why rain on their parade?

Second, regarding your point about ORIGINAL, is any innovation really original? I'd say most of the ORIGINAL innovations you see are actually copies and refinements of existing ideas.

C# was seen as a copy of Java, but later, Java copied the Attributes (annotations in Java) and generics from C#. Innovation is one big stewing pot.

Google for example, was a copy of other search engines, but they innovated by streamlining the UI and copying an existing mathematical concept of weighted network nodes and applied it to the web.

Windows copied Mac which copied Xerox Parc (which you could argue truly invented something original, though they did copy the physical desk ;)

Now, I'm not putting letmebingthatforyou.com in the same category as these things. Those are capital "I" innovations. With letmebingthatforyou.com, we've made some tiny refinements. We auto shrink the URL using TinyUrl and we dynamically update the background to match Bing.com.

Over time, maybe we'll hopefully make some more refinements and make this less a blatant rip-off. After all, this was done on a lark over a weekend.

My point in all this is if we as a industry stop copying each other, innovation comes to a grinding halt. It's the basis for the entire process of innovation,as long as we also make improvements and refine on the existing ideas.

So I say to you and @Pathetic Idea, I'm not going to stop duplicating ideas. I'm going to duplicate, and try to improve. Sometimes I will fail. But once in a while, I'll succeed. But it's better than not trying at all.

I'd love to hear about what innovative things you've done recently.

@Sean the way I see it, I've given the smart-asses of the world a choice in search engines. ;)

@Sean, no, it's probably both. ;)

@Jason I agree, it's not original. However, I'm not a marketer and this isn't a marketing effort. As I mentioned to Sean, I'm just being a smart-ass and providing a choice in search engines. This has nothing to do with Microsoft's marketing efforts.

@Marko no hard feelings taken!

Honestly, I have no relation to the Bing team or its marketing structure. However, I will admit I like Bing. They have a lot of nice touches (like the picture on the homepage). In fact, I made it the default search engine in Google Chrome. ;)

I didn't do this to promote Bing, but to offer choices as I mentioned earlier. For example, if I'm going to be a smart ass to other Microsofties in mail threads, they might prefer the fact that I used Bing (via letmebingthatforyou.com) might soften the sting.

This was literally a lark we put together and I didn't mean for it to sound like it was some sort of big deal. Lesson learned for next time as I was quite taken aback by some of the negative reactions I received. But I take it all in stride. :)