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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.
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.
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.
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.