Microsoft makes fun of Google with Gmail Man video, again | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft makes fun of Google with Gmail Man video, again

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64 pointsViolentJason45 comments

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.

This ad is for Office 365, whatever that is.

I created an account, the whole thing looks pretty good and works from Firefox. Unfortunately I can't send inbound mail 10 minutes after creation of the account, it bounces, but I can send outbound mail.

EDIT: works. This could be a real competitor to Gmail/apps for SMBs.

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.

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?

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.

isn't this an ad for Office 365, which is a different beast than hotmail?

Much like Office 365 competes with Google Apps for Business, not Gmail. Gmail is Hotmail's competitor.

You missed pointing out the huge ad at the top telling you to "Get Hotmail on your Smartphone" in your picture. I mean, this is what like 10%-15% of your screen devoted to ads in hotmail? It's like we're back in 1998.

I think the ads are absent from the Google Apps for Business suite - if you pay for the service, they go away. Isn't 365 a paid product? In fact, it's 20% more expensive than Google's product.

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.

> 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?

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.

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

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.

> I can't see a privacy issue unless some human gets access to that information.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the change in google's privacy policy meant that the data google collects from google+ is shared along the data that they collect from gmail. Which, to my mind, means that the data is both stored, and able to be shared.

To the best of my knowledge, they have not said that they would ever share this information with anyone else. But Google just changed their privacy policy, and I don't think there is any legal recourse should they decide to change it again. Given the financial pressures on Google to sell that information, I fear that there is strong likelihood that it will eventually be sold.

Are you seriously commending Microsoft on a deceitful and misleading ad campaign!? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544095

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

According to Microsoft, you have your priorities wrong, and you should be more concerned about targeted ads. :)

Edit: No sense of humor?

In fairness, isnt office 365 different than hotmail?

Isn't 365 the paid (unlike Hotmail) alternative to Google Apps for Business?

Yes, and I think that is the point they are making. There is no "free" mail. It costs money- so you can either pay for a service, or have your privacy mined for ad revenue.

So, isn't it a bit misleading not to mention Hotmail?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

>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.

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

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

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

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?

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".)

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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