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Microsoft's Anti-Google Video Campaign
eldavojohn writes "As the presidential race heats up, the smear ads on TV are also increasing. But Microsoft isn't going to site idly by and let the politicians engage in all that song and dance — and Microsoft really does employ both song and dance. Their Youtube channel appears to be slowly transforming from trade show videos and launches into a marketing attack or propaganda campaign that only targets Google (both videos I've watched seemed to have nothing positive about Microsoft in them). Under a month ago, they launched a spoof called GMail man, a creepy guy that flips through all your GMail and serves up super personal ads that are wrong (although they never say if Hotmail engages in targeted marketing). And a few days ago Googlighting shows up to spread fear and uncertainty about Google Docs. Most amusing to this viewer was that I found no such trace of 'Googlighting' on Bing's video service."
They're kind of right on this one. I wouldn't trust google docs to run a business. I mean, I might venture to do libreoffice, or other free software, not only because it is a better software model, but it's good for the company, but MS is right in this case. Not so sure about the gmail thing, though I don't appreciate being scanned, which is why I don't use it.
Ok, Microsoft has done countless "evils" in the past and still does, but with that being said, they do a wonderful job of pointing out the privacy issues of Gmail and the risks of implementing Google Apps. Googlighting was an excellent and humorous video as well.
Maybe if Google and MS duke it out enough, all of their little wrong-doings will get pointed out, fixed, and society may actually advance! Or perhaps we will just sit around and watch some mudslinging while our privacy is further reduced. I'm feeling pessimistic at the moment and leaning towards the latter.
Content is content. Google doesn't care what it is as long as you consume it (and of course they track you and advertise at you).
Ever seen the Simpsons talk about Fox? Same deal.
who slag off the opposition. What I really want to hear is why they are better, not rude reasons why the opposition is bad. This sort of thing is a complete turn off -- no matter who does it. Mud sticks to the hands of those who throw it.
I agree with your sentiment, Google do change/abandon projects quite often. But Microsoft suggesting that with their software, you could never "come into the office one day and the software looks completely different" is quite frankly hilarious to anyone who had to suffer the upgrade from MS Office 2003 to 2007 or 2010.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
If you are upset about the idea of a computer reading your mail, then how can you justify using email at all?
Does the MS-Word spelling checker "read" your Word documents?
Microsoft don't need to compete with Apple.
Microsoft are primarily interested in the corporate market - business and government.
Everything else just flows on with that due to the need to be compatible.
Apple has spoken recently of their inroads into business as a "collateral win", an unintended bonus.
They are putting zero effort into replicating or replacing the core feature set that any large business relies on (exchange, active directory, etc).
The reason that Microsoft is scared of Google is that they are actively attempting to make the underlying system immaterial as the Google services become the compatibility glue.
Who cares if the underlying system is running Windows, OSX, Linux or something else when the end user gets exactly the same experience?
That's what Microsoft is scared of, not a high end device manufacturer that interoperates with them.
Eh, maybe some people out there haven't heard of "targeted advertising." After telling YouTube to e-mail me in Japanese, just for kicks, I started getting some hilarious and kind of creepy ads sent my way. Prior, I saw mostly men's products and electronics.
G-mail isn't the only context they use for ad placement, though. Either way, Google gives me free stuff, and makes my web surfing a bit more surreal. I consider it a fair trade.
Microsoft's video is rather crass, but maybe it'll be educational for someone who wouldn't take the Faustian bargain were they fully informed. It's kind of refreshing seeing advertising based on the relative merits of the respective products rather than "Bud Light Summons Women," but on the other hand... Office 365.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I love it that Microsoft uses YouTube (owned by Google) for this. The use of negative ads is tasteless. Then again, it's an election year so it's fashionable.
What they're saying is your company chooses when the ugprades are done and can give employees a heads up. Not to mention how they publish betas, have a published roadmap, developer conferences, etc. etc. The other argument is that you only have to pay for Office once not on a month-to-month basis. Not to knock GoogleApps, but who's to say they don't raise the price next week?
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
More like guild rivalry.
Not in the MMROPG sense, where guilds are glamorized, but rather, in the medical sense, where you had to be a member of a guild to practice your trade or you lost not only the fruits of your labors but body parts as well, and which feuded with each other over their domains.
These days, we call them mega-corporations, and instead of guild charters, we've got copyright and patent laws, but the model of how the field does things would be recognizable by a stone mason from the sixteenth century.
Check your premises.
They're right like Karl Marx was right. Marx wrote about the problems with capitalist systems, and he was absolutely right on many of his points. Then he came up with his own system which was a complete disaster and even worse (much worse) than the system he wanted to replace. This is just like MS: they might have some valid points about Google, but anything they offer up as an alternative is going to be even worse.
Sure, Google will sometimes abandon projects that they offer for free to users. But Google Apps for Business is a product that they sell. They won't be abandoning a revenue stream like that any time soon.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Microsoft is just very upset that they didn't think of it first.
Just like most of their other projects, except Google won't sell to them.
It is because MS is still fixated on stifling open source software from the market place. They see Google as a HUGE threat because they see Google as having let the open source horse out of the barn and now you have companies such as Samsung, Motorola, Amazon, Barnes and Noble among others that are deploying this on devices all over the place. They don't see Apple as a threat that way. Microsoft has always wanted to see their OS on everything ....everything. The widespread use of open source in the marketplace is Microsoft's biggest nightmare.
Anything that Microsoft offers is going to be vastly superior.... in at least one sense as it relates to Google Docs.
Office 365 is a paid only service where the users would be the customers and not the product. That's MS current alternative to Google Docs, and really, they had it up before Google Docs. At least, AFAIK, they did internally. I am not really sure when they officially starting offering it as SaaS.
Google Docs, the free version, is not something I would ever use for business for one second. You have no reason to trust Google, and really, you can't take on that kind of liability with most businesses that deal with anything close to sensitive information about customers. Not possible unless you are really stupid, have no lawyers to tell you are stupid, or just reckless.
There *is* a paid version of Google Docs. You can disable advertisements in gmail in the paid version. However, I still don't feel good about Google having access to all that information. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
With both SaaS platforms you have APIs and can integrate other processes. I'm sure they are pretty similar in the vast majority of features and capabilities.
In the end, I would not want to use either one of them. If I can roll my own and host my own servers I would do that. I am not faced with that particular problem. Most of the stuff I deal with already has robust platforms for that particular industry that allow for a lot of collaboration already.
What MS is really butthurt about when it comes to Google Docs is that they are not offering the free product. MS is not the only one butthurt about it either. The number of businesses that can't make it because they can't compete against Google's free is quite large.
I don't have any particular answers to that. I just know Google causes a lot of problems for business simply because they leverage their advertising revenue to drive products from a paid model down to a free model.
They have no choice. The minute they start controlling the content they lose the "web host" IP protection status.
According to a YouTube video I stumbled upon earlier today, if you buy a Verizon Android phone, Bing will be your only choice of a search engine on that device thanks to a half-billion dollar deal MS made with Verizon.
I guess I won't be getting my next phone with Verizon...
According to the phone in my pocket, Google is the only choice of a search engine on that device thanks to a fundamental conflict of interest between the Android part of Google and the search part of Google.
What's your point?
Where do people come up with this nonsense? They can control the content all the like. But if they do it in a way that is detrimental to their users, people will switch to something else. That is what keeps them from censoring Microsoft and anyone else critical of them, not whatever "'web host' IP protection status" is supposed to mean.
Of course, that doesn't mean Microsoft isn't running a FUD campaign against them. (It seems that they are.)
And Windows in the only choice of an OS to run MS Office on, thanks to a "fundamental conflict of interest" between the Office part of MS and the OS part of MS
Office has been available for Apple computers for quite awhile.
And then there's Google Maps, but again there wasn't that much competition before they came along anyway, and Yahoo and Bing still have their maps products (in fact, Bing maps frequently do better than Google IME).
Some map companies, such as Streetmap or Multimap, would counter that point, arguing loudly that Google unfairly drove them out of business (or to a significantly lower level of business) by promoting Google Maps over their services via search, in breach of EU competition law.
At least, they did, a couple of weeks ago, at a meeting about "search neutrality" (Google* the term if you're interested...) in the UK Parliament last week (I happened to be there - it's not quite as insane as it sounds). That said, recent anecdotal experiments I performed indicated that in most ways Google does actually provide a better service (although I do like some things Bing maps does).
Google has caused quite a lot of problems for small businesses trying to "compete" with Google, particularly when Google has a "rival" service and promotes that via their search. That said, it remains to be seen whether or not Google has crossed the line into unjustifiable anti-competitive behaviour over this sort of thing (and the EC/CJEU, and US FTC etc. will likely be ruling on that soon). Not that MS is a strange to anti-competition lawsuits, iirc it's Windows Media Player-related one in the EU is still ongoing, with MS trying to get out of its >€1bn fine...
*See what I did there?
If you had actually read Marx you'd know that he avoided laying out a blueprint for an alternative system. There are multiple reasons for that: his dislike of utopian socialists, his focus on analysis & critique of capitalism, & his hegelianism come to mind right away. He tended to think that the Paris Commune got a lot of stuff right. It's true that some of the problems of the analysis negatively influenced actually existing socialism, but still, there's no plan for the Soviet state in Capital or anything like that.
except that the kind of "marxism" that they tried to implement in Russia and elsewhere (honestly, China and later are reinterpreted "Stalinism") may well be quite contrary to what Marx actually envisioned.
First off, the envisioned a nation like Germany, that was heavily industrialized via capitalism, to be the starting point. Not Russia that at the time was mostly still agrarian.
Also, he did not envision centralized state control. More likely he envisioned worker run factories and such. That is, the board room was not filled up by shareholders and venture capitalists, but the actual workers of the factory, bank and so on.
So in essence the transition would be form a capitalist run work environment to a worker run work environment. That is, the workers would be working for their own benefit, not some suit and cigar overlooking it all from a posh office.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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You dont think the free hotmail is also looking for keywords to send you ads? You dont think Bing gathers info on you for advertising?
I love how Microsoft tries to pretend theyre not in the advertising industry, but its not terribly convincing. At least google is up front about it.
Because you don't get to be the size of Pfizer by giving up all your profits. You need to re-invest into growth, and you need to be able to reward people working or investing into the company in order to get them to keep doing it.
If you're already rich, like Paul Newman, and don't need more money, then you can set up a little company to make salad dressings and donate the profits. But, unless you're ridiculously rich, you'll never have the money to build a state-of-the-art research facility to develop new drugs.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Because you don't get to be the size of Pfizer by giving up all your profits.
For the sake of argument; why does anyone need to be the size of Pfizer? Or, to provide a more clearly negative example, Monsanto? I actually find that to be a flaw in the system.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
With HTML5 browsers, Google Docs works offline now. You don't have to worry about connectivity or Google going down when working on something critical. For al intents and purposes, it is an offline suite - so I fail to see why someone should not "trust Google Docs to run a business" any more than Microsoft Office.
Secondly - there is no "Gmail man" scanning your mail. It is just a computer. And if you think there is no simmilar algorithm analyzing your hotmail, yahoo mail, or nay other webmail - you have rocks in your heard. If it is really that big of a problem, then use IMAP, where you have no ads and thus no scanning.
Some map companies, such as Streetmap or Multimap, would counter that point, arguing loudly that Google unfairly drove them out of business (or to a significantly lower level of business) by promoting Google Maps over their services via search, in breach of EU competition law.
I used to use Multimap when finding locations in cities before my first visit to them (little things like hotels, stations, where my conference/business meeting was going to be, etc.) and I found it to be a useful service. However, I switched to using Google not because of any cross-promotion with search, but rather because Google's service was significantly better. It was faster, it used more of the screen, it was more usable in general. Could Multimap have competed? I don't see why not, but they seemed at the time to be technologically resting on their laurels, making it easy for Google's better service to steal their lunch.
The moral of this? Nobody owes you a living. Keep up!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"