

Microsoft makes fun of Google with Gmail Man video, again - ViolentJason
http://www.winbeta.org/news/microsoft-makes-fun-google-gmail-man-video-again

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masnick
Yeah, because random Flash ads are way better than text ads that possibly add
value for the user. <https://skitch.com/masnick/g6fn9/hotmail>

I understand that Google needs to make money to provide a great service like
Gmail for free, and I appreciate that they aren't shoving animated shit down
my throat. If they have to algorithmically read my email to do that, so be it.

~~~
Maro
This ad is for Office 365, whatever that is.

~~~
antoko
Office 365 is a cloud-based office setup from MS - which includes email and
office docs its aimed at corporations. It is a newer version of what was BPOS.
Google have been trying to expand into that corporate world. MS are fighting
back since it represents their bread and butter.

~~~
rbanffy
According to Gartner, Google Apps for Business represents .5% of Google's
almost 40 billion revenue. That would be about US$ 200 million a year. What
are Microsoft's BPOS/365 revenue numbers?

~~~
antoko
I have no idea about the numbers but by MS's "bread and butter" I was
referring to business software sales of offline office suite. MS's response to
google's entry into that market was to ramp up their own online versions of
their more familiar office products.

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rauljara
Problems with hotmail/ms aside, I'm really glad a major corporation is going
after google over the privacy issues. It's pretty hard to get people to care
about privacy, and one of the few ways I could imagine the issue entering into
the mainstream conscious is through a major advertising budget. Even if
there's some hypocrisy involved, it's a win just to get people talking about
it.

Here's hoping MS makes a campaign out of it. And that others follow suit.

~~~
rbanffy
> privacy issues.

Is it privacy violation when a machine matches keywords to ads? Unless the
machine has some kind of consciousness, I can't see a privacy issue unless
some human gets access to that information.

Does this mean Microsoft free Gmail competitor, Hotmail, does not relate ads
with viewer profile and screen content?

~~~
powertower
I don't know how Google stores and uses the data gathered by keyword parsing
and subjecting/contextualizing my emails. Or what info the
advertiser/destination gets or can infer.

It could be a potential privacy violation if the data is hacked, leaked, used
to gather intel on my business, analyzed, backed up for eternity, accessed by
3rd party, etc.

> Does this mean Microsoft free Gmail competitor, Hotmail, does not relate ads
> with viewer profile and screen content?

Hotmail does not analyze your emails for keywords. They display ads on other,
less intrusive, factors.

~~~
icebraining
You don't know how Hotmail stores your emails either, do you?

~~~
powertower
The point is that I know Google parses the contents of my emails for keywords
and then transfers that data around its ad systems (at the least). And hence
presents an extra way for things to go horribly wrong.

I also know Hotmail (by it's own admission) does not do this.

Aside from running emails through a spamfilter, I'd rather not have my email
provider gather intel on me via the contents of my emails.

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dhughes
Hotmail is a complete and utter mess; short passwords, constant account
breaches, spam, spam, spam - I wouldn't throw stones.

~~~
onemoreact
You can use long passwords with Hotmail. Also, I get a lot more Gmail spam
than on my old hotmail act, but that could be because I use my name with Gmail
so bot's can just guess it.

PS: Both companies integrate your email act with other services. So I have
been doing a side to side comparisons for a while and while I like Gmail's
interface a _Significantly_ more, Hotmail seems to have a better backend.

~~~
dhughes
I'll have to go check again I only recently got it working and I'm quite sure
the password I chose was restricted to something like 10 to 15 characters.
Nearly all my passwords for other site are a minimum of 25 (completely random)
characters if not longer.

It took me a good solid week of e-mailing support, MS forums, Googling to get
it unlocked. People constantly spam it or think it's their account (I've had
it since '97) so they constantly try to log into it which apparently locks me
the legitimate user out of the account, great feature!

~~~
onemoreact
Typing random passwords that long is simply a waste of time.

70^15 ~= 10^27 passwords assuming a 10 billion computers each checked a 100
billion passwords a second after 10,000,000,000 years there would be a 0.1%
chance they cracked your account.

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bishnu
While these kinds of ads/videos are fun and generate pageviews, they also
scream to their audience "we're #2!" (at best). Other examples include the
"I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads, and the Galaxy S II ad making fun of hipster iPhone
owners [1].

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5rDCbgXgBg>

Edited to correct Samsung phone model.

~~~
yellowbkpk
Your [1] is an ad for the Samsung Galaxy S II, not the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

At least your Mac/PC and Galaxy S2 ads had some copy telling the viewer why
they might want to use the product in question (Use a Mac because it's
simpler, Use the Galaxy S2 because it has most of the features the iPhone 4S
has (and you don't have to wait in line)). This Microsoft ad is just plain
GMail bashing.

Edit: Yikes, why the downvotes?

~~~
recoiledsnake
>This Microsoft ad is just plain GMail bashing

Unlike the others, this isn't really an ad that is part of a big campaign, so
it's not comparable. It is right now just an uploaded video to YouTube, and
doesn't show up in popular TV like the other two ads.

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mhd
A "burning sensation" joke? Seriously, there's ample opportunity for comedy
here and they went with this? Did Microsoft hire Adam Sandler's writers?

~~~
powertower
They didn't fail. The comedy in this video is supposed to be corny.

~~~
sopooneo
It's a very fine line. You can do overtly corny and still be funny. It just
takes clever writing.

~~~
powertower
I don't understand what the complaining is about about.

Was this video supposed to be something else, presented in another way, with a
different dialog? Was it supposed to make _you_ laugh? Is that who it was made
for?

~~~
mhd
I'm definitely more in that target demographic than one for an Adam Sandler
movie. It has a certain blandness about it, a comedy "uncanny valley". The
general direction would've worked for me, but it lacks any kind of style. This
looks like a corporate training video version of fun, something approved by
the type of manager who likes to "liven up" his presentations by the
occasional quip. This is like a joke told via Powerpoint.

It actually wouldn't need all that much to make it work. Make gmail-man a bit
more creepy. Or aim for a certain style of musical (or era). And again,
'burning sensation' has to go.

(Can't believe I'm actually writing that much about what basically amounts to
"meh".)

~~~
powertower
> Make gmail-man a bit more creepy. Or aim for a certain style of musical (or
> era).

So you want to 1) ruin it and then also 2) make it so everyone thinks
Microsoft is bitter.

~~~
mhd
Those are just two examples I could come up with on the spot, I'm sure there
are cleaner and more mainstream ways to spice things up. I thought that if
you're taking the pi __out of Google, you might as well commit to it. I think
that quite a few people already consider this slightly bitter and/or envious.

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emehrkay
Am I supposed to believe that none of MS' online mail properties do the same
things?

~~~
jrockway
They couldn't figure out how to algorithmically serve ads, so they just hire a
real person to read your email and find the right ads.

~~~
emehrkay
They bought Powerset who had some great natural language tech (I had a chance
to talk to one of their engineers before MS bought them).

I believe Bing incorporates Powerset in their search

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jrockway
If it's a violation of privacy to serve ads based on email content, why is it
not a violation of privacy to filter out spam? It's exactly the same thing: a
computer program "reads" your email, and then it does something with the
information it learned.

~~~
jakubw
It's not exactly the same thing. To serve targeted ads, you need to associate
the information you inferred from e-mails with individual users (and with so
much data that goes through your Gmail account, that means building a very
accurate profile of the user: their interests, buying habits etc.). To filter
out spam, you don't need all that. In fact, you can build a pretty decent spam
filter that is entirely contextless i.e. classifies e-mails without knowing
who's the recipient.

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pud
This ad is meant to mislead laypeople into thinking that Google employs humans
to read your email.

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joejohnson
I have to agree with a lot of what microsoft if pointing out. However, gmail
is still superior in features to any of microsoft's email offerings, so I
won't be changing providers. Can anyone name a competitor to gmail that has
all of gmail's features?

~~~
rbanffy
Were Microsoft comparing Gmail to Hotmail, it could be a fair comparison. But
then Microsoft wouldn't be able to criticize Google without admitting their
own banners are completely unrelated to context (and, thus, offer much worse
relevance and click-through ratios).

Or they aren't and, again, Microsoft wouldn't be able to complain.

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yanw
Anthropomorphizing webmail are we?

Equating machine parsing to a human "reading" email is just straight out
deception and preying on the uninformed. Hotmail and every other webmail
service parses emails either to check for spelling errors or combat spam,
Gmail uses adsense as well which is a much less annoying ad system than
Hotmail's display ads.

Oh and Google Apps, the primary target to this Microsoft propaganda is ad
free.

