As far as internal corporate-sponsored parody videos, I would actually have expected a lot worse out of Microsoft than this three-minute takedown of Gmail. Nerd fight!
The crux of the video (reportedly shown on July 20during Microsoft’s annual global sales conference): people hate Gmail, because of Gmail’s snooping and Gmail’s poorly targeted ads and Gmail’s male pattern baldness. How many of those things actually get people riled up these days, I’m so sure. But any Microsoft humour that doesn’t make you cringe has to be considered a solid victory at this point, right? [ZDNet]
EckyThump
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 11:54 AMRegardless of whether I agree with this Add! it certainly comes across as childish! #]
nicky
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 1:03 PM@EckyThump – over the last few days while scrolling comments my eye has many times gone to your: #]
WHAT IS THAT?
EckyThump
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 1:15 PMMy sad sunken eyes, dark and sullen, from years of back breaking work, done for fools and brigands, and the quirky smile, that both intrigues and repulses all the pretty girls and the ugly one too,… or something to that effect…#]
Paul
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 12:00 PMLove it!!
TSH
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 12:21 PMHi! I’m GMail
And I’m Hotmail
y’know Hotmail, it must suck not being linked to YouTube
Well, actually my users can watch YouTube videos from inside an e-mail…
etc. etc.
2SHY
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 12:42 PMUse Google Chrome, and Adblock. I don’t see those Google Adword advertisements.
MDolley
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 2:09 PMJust because you can’t see the ads doesn’t mean they aren’t reading your emails.
Harold
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 2:18 PMHow is this any worse than the targeted advertisements delivered on Microsoft’s love-child Facebook? They vary based on your location settings and whatever you happen to type about.
schmy
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 2:19 PMHa!
Yeah, because I totally love the hotmail approach of letting those same ads, or worse, just appear in my inbox because their spam filtering is so awesmazing?!
Lindsay
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 2:21 PMThat video would be so very boring if realisitc.
Replace the Gmail Man with one of thousands of faceless servers. I suppose it could hum maliciously, but I don’t feel very threatened…
Lord Lavell
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 2:45 PMHello kettle, I’m pot. You’re black. Its all the same crap.
WillD
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 5:20 PMOne major flaw with Microsoft little video – it makes out that a real live person reads your mail and is invading your privacy.
That’s not true – the computer just scans for keywords for advertising purposes, which is how Gmail is paid for.
Very misleading because its trying to scare people away on false pretenses. Devious and dishonest.
anon
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 10:11 PMYou are wrong. These algorithms are written by humans, it makes their life easier because of the shear quality of emails. They skim your mail to efficiently extract its contents, send this to advertising and get a result. The human is eliminated for efficiency, but will control what is taken and used for their own advantage (ie target advertising).
There is no privacy protection anyway. How about I write an algorithm to read your mail, offset each ASCI by 5 (as opposed to converting words into categories) then send that to another part of my ‘business’ which happens to have another algo to offset by -5 ad do what they want without reading the email.
The only dishonest thing is appearing as if MS doesn’t do the same, as already mentioned.
This ad is way better than the lame/arrogant gmail one.