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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."
Who owns youtube?
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.
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!
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.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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.
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