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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
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.
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?
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.
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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