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Microsoft: the 'Scroogled' Show Must Go On
theodp writes "Microsoft says that the death of its 'Scroogled' ad campaign against Google has been greatly exaggerated. 'Scroogled will go on as long as Google keeps Scroogling people,' said a Microsoft spokesperson. 'Nearly 115,000 people signed a petition asking Google to stop going through their Gmail.' So, is Microsoft's scare campaign justified? Well, in a recently-published patent application for a Method and System for Dynamic Textual Ad Distribution Via Email, Google explains how its invention can be used to milk more money from advertisers by identifying lactating Moms, which might make some uneasy. Google also illustrates how advertisers can bid on access to those suffering from breast cancer, bi-polar disorder, depression, and panic anxiety. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?"
Is Microsoft working under the theory that (since they have other profitable areas of business, and Google basically doesn't) it will be wholly worth it if the can salt the earth under both Google and their own advertising efforts?
Or are they making the best of a bad situation by advertising the inferiority of their analytics capabilities as a privacy feature?
Or are they simply hoping that mutually applicable accusations will stick to whoever they are made against first?
I don't know why people even believe in this shit. What, you are all seriously so naive as to think Microsoft is not doing the very same thing? That's the whole fucking reason they offer a mail service, for crying out loud! There is no money in it for them at all unless they extract information that can be monetized. If you want a usable enough service, there can't be nearly enough ads there to pay for it. Google and MS are doing the same, they just use a common tactic of pretending like they are very different. Large-scale free mail hosting is a financial loss unless you mine the data. The data doesn't even necessarily need to be sold to third parties, there are other groups within Google and Microsoft that use it. Just think of how big of a language corpus it gives both companies to develop their other tools on. Imagine you're a search engine or a translation service startup. You're at a big disadvantage to both MS and Google precisely because you don't have billions of sentences of text as your reference.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If I was an advertiser and saw the Sgroogled campaign - the message to me is that Google has a better advertiser platform.
So, Google can scan through emails anonymously and target ads based on that. Nothing new here at all. There is no tie to the actual account when it does this, and nobody is "reading my email". If, however, I'm not OK with algorithms parsing the email, I can just stop using the free service. Simple. And pointing to a settlement where Google paid out because it allowed Canadian pharmacy ads that were against US federal law has NOTHING to do with whether or not they are looking at your email.
This is just fear mongering, much like the Scroogled campaign is to begin with. There are 425 million gmail users according to wikipedia. Having 115,000 complaints is such a small percentage of their user base that it's not really worth talking about. 0.025% Bottom line is that it's an ad-supported platform, and they provide targeted ads that are more relevant. That may be beyond the comprehension of some users and it might make them feel that somehow the whole Scroogled FUD is real, in which case they can opt to use another service.