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."

Comments

Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Who owns youtube?

Re:Youtube

[hcs_$reboot]

That's what I always liked about Google, so far: they are pretty fair regarding search results and other contents in general.

Re:Youtube

[Toe, The]

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.

Re:Youtube

[symbolset]

Hosting videos ads that attack you is such over-the-top fairness that it's remarkable. I hope Google makes more off the ads than Microsoft paid to produce them.

Re:Youtube

[symbolset]

Last I checked seeing the ads is the tradeoff for receiving the amusing content - a deal I entered of my own free will. Nobody clicked it for me, and the ads never came near my throat. This is how the Internet works. If you don't like ad supported content you should probably sell your computer, tv and radio - and cancel your mail delivery too.

Re:Youtube

[poetmatt]

Umm, microsoft still filters results about things involving google and microsoft so that they are favorable to microsoft. This has nothing to do with "IP protection status", and considering that such a phrase doesn't exist, please don't make such a claim.

DMCA protection has nothing to do with choosing to filter content in any way.

Re:Youtube

[FilthCatcher]

Brilliant. I'm going to watch all the Microsoft ads on youtube and make sure I click every ad link I can find on the pages.

Stay Classy Microsoft

[Anne_Nonymous]

Don't ever change.

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[Squiddie]

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.

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[Grishnakh]

True, unlike with political systems, we actually have a great alternative in Free software. No one's come up with a better system that capitalist republics yet, and the alternatives are all horrible: Marxism, feudalism, etc.

In fact, MS criticizing Google is a lot like Feudalists criticizing the Communists.

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[Grumbleduke]

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?

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[swillden]

That's true. The MS alternatives suck, but let's not be blind to the problems that google has. Plus we already have good alternatives. It's called FOSS.

I'm a fan of F/LOSS, but there really isn't a F/LOSS alternative to Docs. What I mean is that while LibreOffice, for example, does a bunch of things that Docs doesn't do, Docs also does some really compelling things that LibreOffice et al don't do. Specifically, Docs is a really powerful collaboration tool. I work for Google, so I've obviously been forced to use Docs extensively, for all of my design docs, presentations, etc. I briefly found Docs' limitations annoying, but the first time I sent a design doc out for review and saw the power of the collaboration model, I knew I'd never go back.

Unless you've tried it, it's hard to understand just how powerful it is to be able to have multiple people all working on a document in real time. Even if you don't need real-time collaboration, it's much better to have everyone commenting on and tweaking the same copy of the document, rather than sending copies around and then having someone try to pull all of the disparate changes together. And when that can happen in real-time, and you have either text chat or even full multi-party video conferencing (Google Hangouts) integrated into the collaborative document system... it's an amazingly effective way to get multiple detailed opinions and quickly arrive at consensus decisions, even when people are scattered around the world.

My kids' school uses Google Apps, including Docs (no, I had nothing to do with that decision; they made it before I joined Google and before I moved here) and I love it for that as well. My kids share their papers with me and I fix minor errors (and later go over the changes with them -- the markup on the revision view makes that easy), or add comments about more significant things I think they can improve, then later I see what they changed. My wife does the same. Sometimes all this happens more or less in real-time, while we're talking about it. Other times, due to schedule mismatches, the automatically-generated e-mails about comments and responses drive the process. It works well either way, though I prefer the interaction.

Of course, when the assignment is complete, turning it in is as simple as sharing the doc with the teacher, and the teacher's comments and corrections show up in the same way, via the same process. It's very powerful.

My wife often writes letters to various entities, and while she has good ideas she doesn't always structure them well, and her grammar, punctuation and spelling sometimes leave something to be desired. So, she writes her letters and shares them with me, and I fix them up. Sometimes I also significantly change the content. Usually she agrees, but not always, and she can always see exactly what I did and easily revert what she doesn't like. Often, we do these steps in parallel, with her still writing the end of the letter while I'm fixing up the beginning. Sometimes I'm even working right behind her, fixing up just a few words behind her.

Perhaps it's just my life, but about the only "documents" I write which aren't collaborative in at least some degree are slashdot posts and the like, so I find that I'd nearly always rather use Docs than anything else. Even if the feature set is rather anemic compared to a "real" office suite (though getting less so all the time).

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[Anthony Mouse]

No one's come up with a better system that capitalist republics yet, and the alternatives are all horrible: Marxism, feudalism, etc.

I came up with one once. It looks a lot like capitalism, but not exactly.

If you think about why capitalism works, it's because power has competition. (And when you think about where it fails, it's where power doesn't have competition.) Because where there is competition, efficient companies succeed and inefficient companies fail.

But you can have competition without greed. Suppose you have corporations chartered for purposes other than maximizing shareholder value: For example, if the goal of a corporation is to engage in commercial activity and use the profits to operate soup kitchens and homeless shelters, or to fund basic scientific research, or to break into consolidated markets with high barriers to entry, whether or not doing those things is profit-maximizing. So for example, you have a drug company like Pfizer, but instead of having shareholders who take profits as dividends, they use the profits to subsidize healthcare for the poor.

And I always wondered why no one had ever tried that before. I actually found out the answer last year. They did try that. In the early 20th century. And it worked. And one of the reasons it worked really well was that if you weren't a profit-seeking corporation, you could incorporate as a non-profit and you didn't have to pay taxes, so all the money that a for-profit corporation would have paid in taxes could instead go to either expanding the enterprise or to doing a larger amount of unprofitable charity work. Which made the IRS very unhappy -- if not-for-profit corporations start successfully taking over industries and using the margins to do charity, the government loses out on a lot of tax revenue. So they banned it. They prohibited tax exempt organizations from doing business commercially in order to raise money to do their charity work.

So you can still do it, but you have to organize as a taxable corporation. And then you have no way of raising the initial capital, because investors will want an ownership stake (which makes you a traditional for-profit corporation again) and donors want a tax deduction (which the IRS disallows if you're a commercial enterprise, profit-seeking or otherwise). So those kinds of corporations effectively no longer exist.

But they could if we wanted them to and changed the law.

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[drkstr1]

Go to File -> See Revision history.

I've been using Docs like a hipster... before it was cool... and it was love at first sight! I have also set up multiple small businesses on Google Apps, and have heard nothing but good things from them. IMHO, it really is a superior model to passing a file around like a chump.

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[Omestes]

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.

Re:Stay Classy Microsoft

[bazorg]

If you are interested in "alternative" types of organisations, be sure to check out the Social Enterprise movement in the UK. Essentially, they are like cooperatives. They are meant to be profitable from selling their services, but a part of the profit needs to be reinvested in the community where they belong. www.socialenterprise.org.uk/

Some of these organisations are healthcare companies, started by doctors and nurses who get their funding from the National Health Service for the first year or 2 and then are expected to become self-sufficient from their sales to individuals and to the NHS. The NHS becomes smaller and hopefully easier to manage, and the local branches independently provide health care within their community.

Thanks for the entertainment

[Daniel Phillips]

Sincere thanks to Microsoft of entertaining me. Ranks right up there with Bill's infamous butt wiggle.

FUD

[Missing.Matter]

The points the Googlighting video try to make is that Google has an unknown track record with office applications, their products lack features compared to the competition, and they have a track record of starting projects and abandoning them without much warning, especially cloud applications. So when Microsoft asks, "is this a product you want to bet your business on?" while it may be FUD, it's a pertinent question.

Re:FUD

[semi-extrinsic]

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.

Re:FUD

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

I gave a very similar argument to a CEO at a company I was consulting on in the construction of a small datacenter. He wanted all Apple servers because he was sold on the ecosystem. After explaining to him that they also have a track record of abandoning their corporate customers, I was given the okay to deploy an almost completely Linux rack (they have one Exchange server). Like everything else it's a matter of the right tool for the job. I'm not sure if I'd ever trust Google Docs for a business, but in fairness Microsoft is pushing just as hard with their Office Online apps. I will say that Google Docs was quite useful in my last year as an undergrad and in grad school as a colaboration platform.

Re:FUD

[unencode200x]

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?

Re:FUD

[Tanktalus]

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.

What are you talking about? Microsoft is completely in the right on this one. That type of rollout would take weeks at least. More if you have a second employee!

Re:FUD

[scdeimos]

What they're saying is your company chooses when the ugprades are done and can give employees a heads up.

And all that's off the table with Office 365 - upgrades happen when Microsoft wants them to.

Re:FUD

[pseudofrog]

...is that it falls between two chairs

I wonder if anyone at Microsoft is capable of moving these chairs?

A beautiful hypocrisy!

[j33px0r]

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.

Not Surprising

[wbr1]

While I am not a fan of google's practices of late, how often has Microsoft not been a FUD spewer?
It is ingrained in their culture.

In theory Apple is MS's biggest competitor, but...

[Qwavel]

you wouldn't know it.

Apple is no longer the company that MS had to prop up (with a cash investment and an MS Office port) for the pretence of competition - they are now the biggest company in the world.

But MS seems OK with that - they still act like Google is their real competitor. Is it because Google is competing in the online space and Apple isn't? Or is because Apple has enormous margins and MS sees this as a positive development in the industry - whereas Google tends to offer things for free and push MS towards lower margins?

I have no idea, but one of these days MS should get over their Google fixation and start thinking about competing with Apple too.

And BTW, Kudos to Google. One of the reasons I'm a fan of theirs is that they seem to compete fiercely with everyone!

They are like politicians ...

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:In theory Apple is MS's biggest competitor, but

[Mountaineer1024]

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.

Re:Really?

[Z34107]

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.

YouTube

[slasho81]

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.

Yeah, That's Because

[Greyfox]

Moble's the next market and Android's already beating Microsoft there. Not to mention that if Google decided to bring Android to a PC environment it would start up immediately with easy access to all the apps in the Anrdroid Marketplace. No other MS competitor has ever brought that many potential ready-to-run applications with their environment. Google could trounce Microsoft across all the markets they service, if Google were so inclined. That idea is bound to be making some sphincters clench in Redmond.

Re:Bing...

[sexconker]

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?

If you had actually read Marx

[radarradar]

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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