Wendel, Logan - what do you guys think of the Scroogled campaign by Microsoft? Personally being from East. KY, everyone believes Microsoft and Apple over Google, so I actually see it taking effect. Personally, I am a Google fanboy, but I want to see what your opinions are.
Think they already covered this in some recent videos.
I'm quite disappointed, I wanted one of the Scroogled mugs (a very sleek black coffee mug for $8), but they sold out before I could get one.
Those mugs weren't that bad.
First Microsoft bought itself an attorney general for antitrust c.q. presidential advisor with Christine Varney (who was also in that seat in the Clinton administration...), and that worked very well to damage Google, but Monsanto then bid more and bought the position, whereby Varney stepped down and Sharis Pozen took the antitrust position, and Microsoft had to step up the Google aggression through other channels.
Microsoft has extended an open invitation to return the favour of crap talking since Ballmer himself started the craptalking race in 2002-2003, when he raged out in a huge craptalking-about-linux-and-opensource event in Munich, which Microsoft was able to buy out of the US media quite well, but it destroyed the last bit of credibility Microsoft had outside of the US.
He then sued Munich together with HP... yeah, that's probably why HP is doing so well now also...
The problem with Microsoft talking crap about others, is that they have to lie to talk crap about other products, because Microsoft's products are pretty much the worst in every category, their software is unsafe crap that performs like shit, they can't even get the IP-resolve bug out of Skype, notwithstanding the fact that they have locked down the P2P server network that serves Skype, effectively handing Skype over to the NSA and who knows who else, their e-mail and cloud services are pretty much direct lines to the NSA, their support is notoriously bad, with a lot of disgruntled employees that are just nothing but plain rude and unhelpful towards customers, etc...
Even if Microsoft's products were decent, which they are not, it's not normal that a company that makes this kind of money from just about anything because of exploitation of anything they can send a lawyer at, can't do decent customer support. Example: in Germany, if you call Microsoft for a license extension in the evening, you have to wait for a long time before being connected to the single German speaking support person Microsoft has in place for the entire DACH zone, and that is a receptionist without IT training, that has to connect you through to the US support center for just about anything, and of course, those don't speak any languages at all, and don't even try to adapt their nasal gatling gun type of awful lingo to a transatlantic telephone line that's relayed a couple of times through a bunch of Microsoft communications servers, so they're really hard to understand, and if one dares to say "Pardon, madam, would you be so kind as to repeat that last code block, I'm afraid it didn't quite come true clearly?", they treat you like an imbecile with a flabbergastingly racist connotation, and that is after the customer has adapted to their native language because they don't have the decency to serve customers in their own language. Happened to me yesterday, and by Jove, I was bloody well ringing them up for an extension of an Azure license for an enterprise customer, it's money for nothing for them...
So let Microsoft talk crap about other companies and modern technologies... everyone is just going to return the favour. As someone personally involved in dealing with a lot of Microsoft-induced damage and aggression on a daily basis for over the last decade, I feel like it's proper to at least point out the deficiencies of Microsoft and Microsoft products in response to their open invitation to reply to their continuous bullocks.
If Microsoft would have spent the money they spent on slandering marketing on hiring non-linguistically-and communicatively-handicapped employees instead, it would do them a lot more good, but hey... since Ballmer took over Microsoft, reason and logic are not really important skills for Microsoft, are they...