Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

http://itechtriad.com/articles/2013/12/30/why-microsofts-scroogled-campaign-is-childish

by srathi • 13 years ago

64 72 13 years ago

itechtriad.com

Blahah2• 13 years ago

Do we really need an article to explain why it's childish? It's face-slappingly, consumer-insultingly childish.

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

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!"

katcooke2• 13 years ago

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

slm_HN• 13 years ago

Microsoft's Scroogled campaign is hilarious.

Crying about Microsoft's Scroogled campaign is childish.

aspir2• 13 years ago

Did anyone really need convincing that the Scroogled campaign was childish? This campaign is so bad, it's going to be used in case studies for years to come.

We're literally looking at history in the making with this campaign. If MSFT declines in the coming years, this will be regarded as a signal of the beginning of the end. If they improve, this will be regarded as a "darkest before the dawn" moment. There are plenty of varying degrees of "bad," but "historical-record bad" is what Scroogled is.

cies• 13 years ago

I came here to say the same.

It seems that chrome books are sooo good that MS feels sooo scared that they have lost all dignity, and now spend big money in a joke that is not funny but actually quite revealing of their sad situation.

skrowl• 13 years ago

Every time I see those ads, I can't help but wonder how many people that had never heard of a Chromebook before went out and researched (and then purchased) one.

jeremiep• 13 years ago

I never understood companies who spend millions in marketing to promote their software rather than spending that money on improving said software.

Why not just build great software that speaks for itself rather than try to manipulate your potential customers with high risks of backfire, as in this case.

tarblog• 13 years ago

Diminishing returns. More money on R&D helps, but not as much as spending some on advertising.

solve• 13 years ago

it was actually later proven that Bing brings many of it results from Google's Search engine

This turned out to be a lie, right?

raldi• 13 years ago

That's a pretty bold statement to make without any kind of citation.

davorak2• 13 years ago

There was some direct evidence that Microsoft was pulling over some of the google spell correction from internet explore as I remember. Google added some universally unique spell corrections and in short order they were pulled over to Bing.

I remember that there were claims, the claims I read were not directly from google, of copying search results as well, but the evidence was not as direct or as damning as for the spelling correction.

nn3• 13 years ago

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's a quite respectable search search engine on its own right. It's not quite as good as google, but I use it regularly to work around some google misfeatures. What really annoys me in google is that you cannot cutnpaste PDF urls from search result. I'm sure there is some workaround, but it's easier to just temporarily switch to bing in the search bar to solve it (and it typically finds the same thing) bing seems to also have less spam.

katcooke2• 13 years ago

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

Flimm• 13 years ago

Here's the workaround: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

davorak2• 13 years ago

Lie is a strong word, it most it would mean someone claimed bing was stealing search results from google while knowing it was not true, rather then misinterpreting the data.

I do not remember such a case lying. Do you remember any other details like who uncovered that it was a lie or who made the report?

Guvante2• 13 years ago

IIRC Google made a honeypot link and got it to show up on Bing without allowing it to be spidered directly (since nothing linked to it).

However Microsoft responded that they used Internet Explorer or some other client side tech with the "use my searches" options turned on to go to the honeypot on google.com, leading to Microsoft to get a hold of it.

So less of a "Microsoft steals Google results" and more of a "Microsoft follows Google results when you use their browser and don't tell it not to".

magicalist2• 13 years ago

If you really think that, giving it more attention isn't a great way to combat it. I'm sure they knew full well that there was going to be some negative reaction, but that the trade off for brand awareness (so much free coverage of their ad campaign) and introducing some level of doubt in some consumers' minds was worth it (see: negative political attack ads, Mark Penn, etc).

(and bringing up Bing copying Google's search results, and the ad campaign backfiring and somehow leading to chromebook sales isn't going to lend itself to a non-stupid HN discussion)

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

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.

Blahah2• 13 years ago

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/microsofts-bing-use...

unfunco• 13 years ago

Edit: Apologies, the same link has been posted above, we posted at approximately the same time, I'm leaving this here to avoid a [deleted].

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/microsofts-bing-use...

city41• 13 years ago

Even worse, "search engine" in that sentence was a link. Hovering over it shows it's one of those cheesy keyword ads. Ugh.

rayiner• 13 years ago

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

throwawaykf035• 13 years ago

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.

throwawaykf035• 13 years ago

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...

cbr• 13 years ago

"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.)

ThoreauAway• 13 years ago

was it just me, or were the comments on that story unreadable until highlighted?

raganwald• 13 years ago

This is the company that shamed its own customers by calling them "dinosaurs" for not upgrading to new versions of Office. In a multi-million dollar advertising campaign.

When it comes to their marketing, absolutely nothing surprises me any more.

mikestew• 13 years ago

Thanks, Captain Obvious. Now that we've established that the campaign is childish, can we move on to the question of whether it's working? I viewed the "Mac vs. PC" Apple ads to be a bit childish (and it's almost all Macs and iOS at our house), but folks seemed to like them. Can the same be said for "Scroogled"? Of the one or two I've seen, I think I'd go out of my way to avoid the MSFT product out of spite. But that's just me. Maybe my judgement of what people like is as poor as it was for the Apple campaign.

poopsintub• 13 years ago

Exactly. Let's compare apples and oranges and make outrageous points that don't even matter. My guess is that's what good marketing is.

PetrolMan• 13 years ago

I think I'd be less bothered by the campaign if they weren't selling merchandise. For some reason, that seems to be the tipping point for me. The campaign is idiotic and now seemingly hypocritical but the attempt to market merchandise just feels weirdly desperate.

mortyseinfeld• 13 years ago

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).

aspir2• 13 years ago

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.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

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.

mullingitover• 13 years ago

I hope Microsoft goes after Google even more.

Same here! If you look at the sales numbers for the past year, Microsoft is doing nothing but going 'after' Google. Keep it up, guys.

mbillie1• 13 years ago

Sorry for this utter lack of meaningful contribution, but I read this in my head in a Morty Seinfeld voice and laughed.

marknutter• 13 years ago

It's also somewhat insidious. I was watching my local morning news show when the anchors cut to a segment featuring a "tech reporter in Washington D.C." who was going to give advice about buying tech gifts for the holiday season. Laid out on the table were a bunch of Microsoft products and the reporter proceeded to spew a hit piece aimed squarely at Chromebooks. Never was there any indication that it was a sponsored story but it was clearly a Microsoft backed segment. It was truly bizarre. I don't know how often companies pay news shows to pimp their stuff but I've never seen anything that blatant before.

VLM3• 13 years ago

The phrase you need to google for, err, I mean bing (LOL just kidding) is "Video News Release"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_news_release

Its not new, although they've been growing in popularity for decades. I could see a stream of nothing but VNRs eventually replacing TV infotainment as we know it today.

computerslol• 13 years ago

I found the ad hilarious. Google is an ad company. A brilliant ad company, but still an ad company. As far as I know, this is something that is not on most consumer's minds.

The scroogled ads are pretty good for microsoft standards.

My concern is less with the data collection, and more with the lack of native application support. If it looks like a laptop, consumers like my parents will think they found the best deal in the world when they come across it. I have talked both of them out of buying one because it won't run the work applications they need (they wanted to use it to replace their aging laptops). If it was a tablet, I'd have no problem with it. Consumers are used to the idea of tablets as toys (and don't expect them to run office and their workplace's custom windows apps).

As a programmer, I really don't want another platform to write native apps for; there are so many already. I'll learn it if they get enough market penetration. I don't know enough about the native APIs for the chromebook; how different is it to write a chromebook app than an android one? Is it web only? Are you really cut off from any functionality if you aren't around wifi?

btian• 13 years ago

No. Google is a tech company. Ad is a way to sustain the company. Just like News Corp is a media company, not an ad company.

RodericDay• 13 years ago

Oh please about 97% of Google's revenues come from advertising.

People need to know this.

VLM3• 13 years ago

"how different is it to write a chromebook app than an android one?"

I almost bought my wife a chromebook for christmas, I researched this a bit for fun. Might buy one for myself too.

Basically you google for "how to write chromebook app" (or Bing, LOL who am I kidding no one uses bing) and eventually get to

https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index

You probably want "packaged app" which unsurprisingly turns out to be "how to write a chrome browser app"

I thought it was all pretty interesting and have a few ideas to try.

"I really don't want another platform to write native apps for"

Careful careful, thats how cobol programmers and the like get stagnant and then unemployable. I'm not saying dive in head first, but sticking a toe in to see what the water is like, is perfectly reasonable. Go have some fun.

In practice, lets be realistic, its 2013 soon 2014, 99% of "apps" use web pages as the presentation layer. I'm not going to write anything to use gmail or hangouts or google drive or facebook or a bazillion other end user applications. 99% of her time osx is just a Chrome bootloader for my wife, so I'm thinking of moving it out of the way...

jasomill• 13 years ago

Maybe so, but lots of people use the remaining 1% for most of their work, and some of us prefer the OS X (or Windows, or X11) desktop environment to the browser for most applications. I sure do, though I also generally prefer well-designed Web pages to native mobile apps for accessing information on the Internet.

derekp7• 13 years ago

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 people on many sites that I visit. And these ads have nothing to do with me, except that I happened to fact-check something a couple times. Kind of makes me want to re-think any of my web searches, and do them in a private browsing window.

I can't really say why this bothers me -- maybe it is because I know that their ad matching algorithm gave inaccurate results (so it grates on my OCD, maybe?), or maybe it just feels like I'm being stalked by people trying to sell me something.

magicalist2• 13 years ago

I know what you mean. It's the retargeting ads that bother me, mostly because I get so many for something I actually bought, not just something I went to their site, considered, and then didn't buy. Leave me alone now! (I'm looking at you, zappos)

For google ads, at least, you can click the "ad choices" button on the ad and clear the things it guesses about you (you can obviously also just delete the doubleclick cookie). I actually don't mind doubleclick ads so much (don't burn me at the stake) since they can't combine it with your google account information and I have depended on them for my source of income in the past, so I do wish they had a button for "clear retargeting ads" but left all the other demographic info in place.

pgrote• 13 years ago

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.

pak• 13 years ago

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.

Negitivefrags• 13 years ago

One of my friends now gets large numbers of ads for schizophrenia medication.

You have to wonder how these kinds of things happen. Or perhaps Google knows something we don't...

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

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.

I was recently really confused as to why I was seeing so many ads for young women's clothing. I'm a 28 year old man. Then I realized I read an article on HN about Nasty Gal's great successes.

So very very creepy.

RexRollman• 13 years ago

Lately, everytime I search for something on Amazon, it will appear on other websites as well. It is probably Amazon doing it but it is annoying, to the point where I know log into Amazon using private mode.

praptak• 13 years ago

"Scroogled" is used by Googlers ironically as in "Scroogled again: only three flavors of soy-free vegan whipped cream in the cafeteria today!"

chasing• 13 years ago

Scroogled. Office 365. Surface. Xbox One. Microsoft's marketing seems to be remarkably tone-deaf across-the-board.

ef47d35620c1• 13 years ago

I recently bought a laptop for my daughter this Christmas. I considered all makes and models and finally decided on a Dell running Windows 8. I looked closely at Chrome Books, but felt she would be at a disadvantage without Windows and Office. It cost more than the Chrome Books, but I felt it was the right choice. She can still use Google services if she likes and MS software and services as well. I thought it was the best, most versatile choice. Just my own personal experience, I can see the value in Chrome Books too.

notacoward2• 13 years ago

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 there are also massive gaps that make it almost unusable for anything medium-size or larger.

(2) Microsoft's characterization of Chromebooks as "useless without the internet" is not entirely wrong. Constant internet connectivity might be the norm everywhere the author has gone, but it's still not something one can rely on in every corner of the globe. That being the case, "suitable for use while traveling" really might not apply sometimes. By the author's own cited definition, Chromebooks - like the one I'm typing this on - might not be real laptops for many people.

In both cases, the author starts with a grain of truth and then destroys his own point with exaggeration. The piece would have been far more effective if he had stuck with the facts - which are damning enough - instead of letting his bias shine through.

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

Not to mention, a lot of marketing is childish. The Mac vs. PC ads were childish. They worked ( to the extent anyone can say TV ads work)

sigsergv• 13 years ago

Mac vs. PC campaign was also very ironic and inspiring (probably because it suggests and proposes new features, new way of thinking), but MSFT campaign is really stupid (if not worse, because it's merely portrays google in a negative light).

Metrop0218• 13 years ago

"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...

notacoward2• 13 years ago

That's good to know, thanks. I haven't used it myself. I have used the collaborative editing in Google Docs, and it's done well enough that I don't see a whole lot of room for improvement, but I certainly wouldn't deny the possibility that Office has reached parity in this area.

throwawaykf035• 13 years ago

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 very wrong, I laughed along at them. Similarly, I'm primarily a Gmail user, but that GmailMan character is hilarious.

3. However the campaign appears to us, apparently it's working?! http://adage.com/article/digital/microsoft-s-google-bashing-...

On the other hand, some doubt if that's really translating into commercial success: http://marketingland.com/microsoft-scroogled-campaign-61887

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll

throwawaykf035• 13 years ago

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

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

dsugarman• 13 years ago

It may be childish but Apple's similar childish campaign completely destroyed Microsoft's brand.

bdcravens• 13 years ago

More or less childish than Samsung commercials who associate the iPhone with brainless caricatures standing in line?

code_duck• 13 years ago

I like the "wearables" response also.

When asked about the shirts, Google said that they "are very interested in Microsoft's latest venture. The wearables market is becoming very competitive".

This could be taken as a reference to Google Glass. MS and their vendors don't seem to have anything near ready to show to compete with Glass, but apparently they're on top of the T-shirt game.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Warning Rant mode:

Wow, that is an insanely monetized blog. Does anyone else see random works linking to search ads and if you select something you get a search query ad?

The content is also pretty muddy. In my opinion Microsoft's campaign isn't childish, it's just lame. Does Google do all these things? Of course they do, it makes them billions of dollars a quarter. Does it bother Microsoft that they can't seem to get away with the same kinds of things? Of course it does, their search ads monetize at 1/3 to 1/5th the rate that Google's do. Would they like someone other than folks who understand how search works to "get" this ? Sure.

But that is the same battle animal rights people have trying to convince egg eaters that the eggs came out of tortured chickens. At one level it may be true, and at a much larger level it may be totally irrelevant to the consumer.

So where does that put the OP who is trying exploit Microsoft's strategy to pick up some AdSense coin out of Google? Does he care? Really? His subtext is "Hey we're all gettin' rich here off the Goog, Microsoft. Go whine somewhere else." Heck Google doesn't particularly care about their search results at the level where this is being argued, they only care that they are tasty enough to lure enough eyeballs to feed their customers, the advertisers. If they get less tasty they will fix them, if someone gets mouthy about whether or not their content should be considered tasty they will fix them too.

There is web search technology which is one thing, and there is web search the business which is a completely different thing. Confusing them will make it hard to reason coherently about them.

Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

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