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Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

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Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#61

Post by ogreyonder »

rejschaap wrote: post #52
RodericDay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please about 97% of Google's revenues come from advertising. People need to know this.

And a circus is a ticket printing company, 95% of their revenue comes from selling printed tickets. I really don't know why they still bother with the elephants and acrobatics...

You... might want to reconsider that analogy.

Claiming that News Corp is a media company is somewhat tenable. They sell "media" direct to consumer, among other things, and media is an end product.

Claiming that Google is an ad company is, similarly, tenable: they sell ads. Showing ads is the end product.

You may just have been making a joke, in which case I apologize for the lengthy response, but claiming that a circus is a ticket printing company in no way relates to either argument.

Tickets are categorically not a product. Nobody would care if a circus uses tickets or stamps or facial recognition. They are a means to admittance to the end product. The show. That's why they bother with the elephants and acrobatics.

Google, on the other hand, is in fact an ad company. They sell ads for the vast majority of their revenue. That's what they do. They dabble elsewhere and are expanding to new areas which is totally fine. Just look at the history of Nokia--ever heard of Nokia the paper company or Nokia the galoshes manufacturer?

However, as a company that is exploding with cash from the ad business, Google has clear priorities. They maintain their current revenue and use their fantastic capital for other stuff that at the very least won't hurt that business. More likely, they invest in things that will further it by collecting your information and showing you ads. Like the Chromebook.

All that said, the Scroogled campaign is silly and not an effective way to raise that issue.

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#62

Post by dragonwriter »

aspir wrote: post #22
mortyseinfeld wrote: post #19

Great. I hope Microsoft goes after Google even more. SkyDrive blows away GDrive. Windows tablets are coming into their own right, while Android is pretty much "meh" these days. Google flails away aimlessly with their chromeOS strategy, all the while doing lots of evil (with Eric Schmidt on the board still how can it not).

If Microsoft products are truly better than Google/Apple, they should move the conversation to those products, rather than discussing their competitors. I hear more about Chromebooks from this campaign than I do from Google's own ads.

> If Microsoft products are truly better than Google/Apple, they should move the conversation to those products, rather than discussing their competitors.

If they were, they would be.

> I hear more about Chromebooks from this campaign than I do from Google's own ads.

And the main thing I hear from this campaign is that Microsoft is desperately afraid that I might by a Chromebook.

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#63

Post by pak »

pgrote wrote: post #45
derekp7 wrote: post #32

Well, in spite of the silliness of those commercials, lately I have been creeped out when I start getting blasted by adverts from all over the web based on something I recently searched on. Often times, I'll quickly look up something / fact check what I've read in an article (most recently was "longevity insurance" annuities and reverse mortgages), and now I'm getting a whole bunch of ads aimed at older / retired peo…

Is there a way to turn that off? I don't mind the adwords ads since they sometimes help me find what I am looking for. They are useless, though, if they display ads for things I've searched for in the past.

If you're on Chrome (in which case there will be no lasting victories, only small ones), there's this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iba-opt-out-by-goo...

This looks like it does the same thing for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/targeted-adve...

There may be IBA opt-out extensions for other browsers. AFAICT all they do is permanently block the DoubleClick and related cookies.

This, in combination with Adblock Plus, seems to do the job for me. There are a lot of people complaining that the extensions don't work, but they probably do not realize that these only block the collection of new data tied to your browsing history, and not the display of the ads themselves, which is what you need Adblock Plus for.

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#64

Post by throwawaykf03 »

rayiner wrote: post #23
jrochkind1 wrote: post #10

> it was actually later proven that Bing brings many of its results from Google's search engine What's he talking about? Making this claim without a cite is annoying. Making copy-and-paste not work so I couldn't even copy and paste it here is even more annoying.

I wish Bing got its results from Google. It seems to be the unchangeable default on my Lumia, and it's shockingly unbelievably terrible.

Hmm, most results are decent for me, and though I need to reach for the Google app once in a while, I don't even keep it pinned to start anymore.

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#66

Post by Metrop0218 »

notacoward wrote: post #48

Yes, the campaign is childish, but so are the article's misrepresentations. For example: (1) Google Docs - not Drive - does not have "nearly the same capabilities" as Office by any reasonable definition. FFS, they don't even seem to have proper support for custom paragraph styles, widow/orphan control, etc. There are certainly ways in which Google Docs improves over Office, especially wrt collaborative editing, but t…

"especially wrt collaborative editing" - The office web apps got real time collaborative editing a couple of months ago [1]. I've used it and it works quite well.

[1] http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/11/06/c...

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#67

Post by throwawaykf03 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #60
throwawaykf03 wrote: post #56

1. According to MS, this campaign came out of a survey where something like 45+% of users didn't know Gmail scans their emails, and 80+% of those didn't approve of it (I think this is the survey http://www.scribd.com/doc/124257005/GfK-Email-Privacy-Report ). That's a pretty significant number of users. 2. The "I'm a Mac" campaign was childish, and even though I was predominantly on Windows then and the ads were so ve…

> According to MS, this campaign came out of a survey where something like 45+% of users didn't know Gmail scans their emails, and 80+% of those didn't approve of it You think when they brought veteran political campaign pollster Mark Penn [1] to run the anti-Google campaign, he brought political-campaign-style negative ads but left the push polls [2] at home? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Penn [2] http://en.…

Right, and I guess this is the result of a push poll too:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/technology/google-accused-...

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#68

Post by jedmeyers »

katcooke wrote: post #46
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly hypocritical, however. "Look at how Google is spying on you! Here at Microsoft, we totally don't do such shenanigans. I swear on me mum, mate!"

The specific claim that they don't track users by phrases inside the texts of their emails does check out.

Who checked it? A "1 hour ago registered" astroturfer?

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#69

Post by jedmeyers »

katcooke wrote: post #44
nn3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC it turned out to be a side effect of their "toolbar" data collection. If most people using googles toolbar would use bing they would see a similar effect. But calling it "they get search results from google" is stretching the truth. Of course why anyone would submit all their surf history to any of those big brother companies (M or G) in the first place is a complete mystery. But overall bing is not too bad. It'…

Ironically, Google's own toolbar(which was bundled by OEMs who took money from Google), sent people's web site visits even after configuring it to say no. http://www.benedelman.org/news/012610-1.html

Ironically, a lot of new accounts appeared on HN lately posting claims against Microsoft competitors and telling stories about how a new Surface Pro helped them do their engineering studies homework.

Re: Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

#70

Post by cbr »

throwawaykf03 wrote: post #50
jrochkind1 wrote: post #10

> it was actually later proven that Bing brings many of its results from Google's search engine What's he talking about? Making this claim without a cite is annoying. Making copy-and-paste not work so I couldn't even copy and paste it here is even more annoying.

Read both sides of the story rather than just Google's accusations: http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-... http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-ac...

"Google alleges that Bing monitors what people search for on its site, if they have Internet Explorer equipped with certain features. Bing doesn’t dispute this. But Bing isn’t just monitoring what happens at Google. It monitors what people do as they travel across the entire web."

I'd love to see that on the Scroogled page.

(I recognize that on the internet I have basically no privacy from people who want to extract useful signals from my behavior. It sounds icky but in practice it doesn't seem to be a problem and it's a huge pain to prohibit. What bothers me is Microsoft pretending to be pro-privacy and anti-tracking when it does the same kind of data collection and mining as everyone else.)

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