Microsoft's search engine was Live Search, a distant third behind Google with no consumer brand to anchor it. The company decided to bet on a relaunch — new name, new identity, an eight-figure brand campaign, a Steve Ballmer keynote at the All Things Digital conference on May 28, 2009. The brand-launch UX had to land on a hard public date, alongside engineering and ranking work being finished simultaneously.

Browsers in 2009 were uneven on rich media. Committing the flagship homepage to a full-bleed daily-changing background image — and later, HTML5 video — meant accepting that the long tail of browsers would need a graceful fallback. The HTML5 spec was still landing in mainstream browsers; major consumer surfaces hadn't yet committed to it at flagship scale.

Owned core Bing UX program management through the launch sequence — homepage, results page, image search, refine pane — coordinating across the design organization, the brand team, and the engineering org running the production ranker. The homepage's identity move was a daily-changing full-bleed background image, with hover hotspots that taught users what kind of surface they were looking at. Search wasn't trying to feel like a database query anymore; it was trying to feel like a place.

After the launch stabilized, drove the HTML5 video extension on the homepage — adding webm / mp4 / ogg encodings, JavaScript feature detection, and a non-video fallback path so downlevel browsers wouldn't break. Coordinated with the engineering teams handling playback, asset pipeline, and the bandwidth posture of a property serving hundreds of millions of pageloads a day.

Before Bing, ran international program delivery for MSN channels — Movies, Entertainment, City Guides, Travel — across markets where brand and product hadn't shipped together before. That work built the muscle for getting consumer-grade UX across regions on a shared platform, and was the lane that made the Bing program assignment make sense.

Bing launched June 3, 2009. The brand re-established itself; the homepage became one of the most-visited pages on the open web. The daily-image format ran for years and became a recognizable Bing artifact in its own right.

The HTML5 video extension shipped in late 2011, putting Bing among the earliest major consumer properties to commit a flagship surface to the spec at scale. Recognized with a Microsoft Gold Star award for the brand release.

The ten-year Microsoft chapter is where the editorial-meets-platform instinct started — pressing brand expectations against engineering reality, repeated long enough that the pattern became the way of working. Every chapter after this — Zillow, Nike, Dick's — runs on the same instinct.

Microsoft Gold Star Award