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Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
131–140 of 178 posts
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#132It's unfortunate that the marketing folks at Microsoft are looking to take this stance to unbelievable levels. I would rather see relevant ads than irrelevant ads. I used to work at Microsoft. I heard second hand that some exec (I believe they said it was Ballmer) in the last couple of years made the decision that Microsoft would make privacy a competitive differentiator. This sounds great on the surface, but it has…
It's unfortunate that privacy isn't what the market cares about. I didn't know MS has this sort of policy, but it makes me tons happier with using their services.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#133I think this is a sign of Microsoft's desperation to stay relevant. Most of the Surface reviews have spoken poorly about the device. Windows RT hasn't been well received. They've tried to revamp their entire image -- with new hardware, software, and extensive marketing -- with limited success. "Look at how cool our product is" hasn't worked for them, so they're resorting to "look at how terrible their product is." Yo…
"Most of the Surface reviews have spoken poorly about the device." What reviews have you been reading? Edit: Regarding the actual topic, this is just "normal" PR it's a way to scare people into swapping from gmail to outlook.com unfortunately it works better than many might think. Microsoft aren't the only ones doing PR like this it's a lot more common than you might think. I think PR like this _can_ be good for two…
All of the original Surface reviews were negative. The Surface Pro reviews seem to be mostly positive.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Creepiness"? Are you a child? You seem to comprehend how Google runs its business and pays for its services. Isn't it incredibly ludicrous to call it creepy?
No, reading personal email to deliver advertisements is creepy. It's better than it used to be but we all remember seeing things like casket advertisements when an email mentioned dead code, etc etc. It's creepy, and I would gladly pay google monthly to prevent them from abusing my privacy. But Google doesn't want money from me, it wants to abuse my privacy. That's far more profitable. It's unfortunate but too many s…
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Most of the Surface reviews have spoken poorly about the device." What reviews have you been reading? Edit: Regarding the actual topic, this is just "normal" PR it's a way to scare people into swapping from gmail to outlook.com unfortunately it works better than many might think. Microsoft aren't the only ones doing PR like this it's a lot more common than you might think. I think PR like this _can_ be good for two…
All of the original Surface reviews were negative. The Surface Pro reviews seem to be mostly positive.
"All of the original Surface reviews were negative"
No they're not? Then you haven't read ALL of them, mine weren't negative and most of the ones I read weren't negative either.
I don't think you want to remember the positive ones, but there are a lot of them.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's more: http://readwrite.com/2013/01/03/googles-ftc-settlement-is-an...
Surely I didn't read that right, MS have a $50 million budget just for Google smear campaigns!? One of the biggest things that makes my blood boil is when corporations invest large sums of money to force consumers to use their crappy products instead of spending that money on making less crappy products that consumers choose to buy.
Microsoft's huge smear budget is harmful to taxpayers too, because they actively have tricked large segments of the U.S. Federal Government (for example, the Dept. of Defense) into only using Microsoft software due to "the inherently insecure nature of open source." Even worse, they smear any browser that isn't IE. That holds back software adoption big time.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#137I think this is a sign of Microsoft's desperation to stay relevant. Most of the Surface reviews have spoken poorly about the device. Windows RT hasn't been well received. They've tried to revamp their entire image -- with new hardware, software, and extensive marketing -- with limited success. "Look at how cool our product is" hasn't worked for them, so they're resorting to "look at how terrible their product is." Yo…
>so they're resorting to "look at how terrible their product is."
I'll presume you must have felt the same way about Apple's I'm a Mac/I'm a PC series of ads? Since all they really did was try to paint a picture of how terrible PCs were, and since Windows is the dominant PC OS, how terrible Windows was.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, reading personal email to deliver advertisements is creepy. It's better than it used to be but we all remember seeing things like casket advertisements when an email mentioned dead code, etc etc. It's creepy, and I would gladly pay google monthly to prevent them from abusing my privacy. But Google doesn't want money from me, it wants to abuse my privacy. That's far more profitable. It's unfortunate but too many s…
Let's define what "read" means in this context. A computer program, most likely a C++ binary, takes the string of your emails, splits on U+0020 and sends the resulting array through a series of algorithms like Levenshtein distance to match to its database of ads.
Text mining has come a long way since 1985, so I don't think that's how it's done (in fact I know it's not done that way), but I guess what you mean is that no human ever looks at the data. That's possible, but not reassuring.
Many of the shady purposes this data could be misused for don't require a human to ever read it. Say, one day, that C++ binary computes a score that indicates how reliable, credit worthy, dangerous, healthy, honest or skilled you are.
Say another C++ binary makes a decision that influences your life based on such a score. A decision on health insurance, banking, job applications, security matters, etc. Is that better, just because no human ever looked at the data and giggled because you searched for some embarrassing disease?
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#139I don't like it as an advertising strategy, and I don't particularly like Microsoft in general, but at least their aim is right: Google has absolutely zero respect for privacy.
Microsoft's attempt to push Google down the same hole they dug themselves with monopoly abuse however is as tasteless as it is unnecessary: Google's own infinite arrogance will ensure they'll keep digging until they face a public and regulatory backlash.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#140Funny MS suggest they'll do this themselves:
"We use the information we collect to provide the services you request. Our services may include the display of personalized content and advertising." from http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/default.mspx