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."

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: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.

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!

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:Bing...

[Grishnakh]

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...

It's because Apple is a phone company

[billlava]

Sure, Mac has been making strides, and I have a friend who swears by 'Pages' and 'Keynote,' but it's the iPhone, iPod, and iPad that have made Apple the behemoth it is today. Microsoft would love to make money in these markets as well, but they already ARE raking in tons of cash from MS office, and Exchange servers and other software for businesses. That is where Google (and not Apple) can really hurt them, and with the shift toward cloud services, MS is right to fear Google, and they have some decent points to be made about consistency and long-term reliability that you can reasonably expect from Microsoft.

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: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: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

[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

[mwvdlee]

In judging any political systems viability, you should not look at how the system would operate according to the proposed model.
You must look at how corrupt and unscrupulous sociopaths could abuse the system to the detriment of others.
Most proposed political systems can only deal with a very small percentage of citizens undermining the system, in reality much more people will disagree with atleast some parts of it.
IMHO, political systems like marxism and communism seem to work well in small communes of a few dozen willing people, but they fail when introducing enough unwilling people into the system, as has been widely demonstrated.

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.