New Microsoft Ad Campaign

There was a lot of people who blogged about how bad the new ad campaign from Microsoft looked with this first commercial.

Now, obviously they have to set it up if it is going to be a campaign, like the Apple ads, and this was obviously supposed to be about nothing to start with, hello, can you say Seinfeld? It’s like all people do nowadays is use their blogs to bitch about stuff, but I guess that’s the way it’s always been. I thought the first one was funny and the second one below is pretty good too. Here’s to many more.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Advertising, Funny, Microsoft 1 Comment » September 2008

Top 20 Websites by Unique Visitors

Hard to believe, but in October there were 20 websites that had over 20 million unique visitors apiece! If you put all four of Microsoft’s sites together, they are number 1 by over 80 million unique visitors! According to Compete.com.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Microsoft, Traffic Rankings No Comments » December 2006

Pron Prank and Your Image

I have been reading the little episode between the Microsoft RSS Team Blog and Niall Kennedy with some interest, it appears Sean Lyndersay posted an image of Niall’s from Flickr and did not post a link or attribute the photo to anyone. Niall took offense, as he should’ve, and he replaced the image, not with a graphic that said stop stealing my bandwidth or, even better, a Firefox logo, he put up a picture from goatse, a porn image with the Creative Commons logo covering his behind. While, initially funny, it could’ve been handled a lot better than it was.

Kennedy explained via phone that he had offered his ordinary photo (taken at the Gnomedex conference a couple years ago) for use under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be posted on non-commercial sites, with proper attribution. (Hence the Creative Commons logo censoring out the central part of the pornographic replacement image.) He wasn’t pleased that Microsoft used his photo on a commercial site, without attribution. In addition, he said, the use of the photo violated the Flickr terms of service by not linking back to the site.

“Basically they stole one of my photos and put it on their blog,” Kennedy said. “I decided to make them very aware of that fact.” Source: seattlepi.com

Robert Scoble posted about the incident here, Niall sends Microsoft team a porn message, and he said pretty much the same thing that I thought, he could’ve handled the situation better. Apparently, if I am reading everything correctly, Niall changed the image and then contacted Microsoft, instead of contacting them to ask them what is up first. And he said, someone from the RSS team contacted him and no one there was contacted about the mistake.

Ahh, so someone at Microsoft made a mistake and didn’t correctly use an image from Niall Kennedy’s feed from Flickr (or didn’t pay attention to the Creative Commons license agreement). So, what did Niall do? Did he call up one of his former co-workers at Microsoft and explain that he was pissed and get the problem taken care of nicely and behind closed doors? No.

He replaced the image with a porn image, Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI reports.

I’m sure that gets everyone 16 and under to laugh, but is that really the best way that Niall could have gotten the image taken down? Source: Scobleizer

Nope. And I bet Niall wouldn’t think so if the same thing happened to him, but what do I know. It is kind of funny that someone from Microsoft did this, especially with their big anti-pirating push, and certainly everyone who hates Microsoft has enjoyed this, but it could’ve been handled differently. As Robert was trying to say, stuff on the internet may never go away, and while you may not need anyone or anything else right now, you could find yourself in a worse position one day because of things you do today.

Maybe Niall needed some extra traffic this week…

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, Microsoft, Mistakes No Comments » December 2006

MSN Invites Advertisers to Test ContentAds

Looks like Microsoft is ramping up their advertising efforts, inviting advertisers to test their ContentAds system, which is supposed to begin this fall. Hopefully, as Jen says, this will end up running on non Microsoft sites as well, much like Google Adsense and Yahoo’s offering.

The email invited advertisers received mentioned the various MSN properties than contextually targeted ContentAds would appear on, such as MSN Real Estate and MSN Money, as well as others linked from the main MSN portal. However, it was key noticing the exact text (emphasis mine in the following) and what it means for publishers.

Content Ads is Microsoft’s next product that allows advertisers to place content-targeted, text-based advertisements primarily on Microsoft-owned properties including MSN Money, Real Estate, and many others within the www.msn.com portal.

Always good to get new players capable of sending traffic, even if you have to pay for it.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: ContentAds, Contextual Advertising, Google, MSN, Microsoft, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Yahoo No Comments » August 2006

Google Announces Office 2.0

If anyone here reads techmeme, then today is Google day, easily half of the page is dedicated to this story, the story of Google releasing more beta products to try to claim market share from Microsoft. Google released the info to some of the top tech sites, but not to any of the big blogs, like Techcrunch, etc. And I think it becomes very apparent that a lot of the people writing about it have never tried Googles offering, they just trumpet whatever they are doing at the moment. From InformationWeek,

For such sharp rivals, the contests between Google and Microsoft have been laughably lopsided.

And they still are.

Google this week will launch Google Apps for Your Domain, a software bundle aimed at small and midsize companies. The free, ad-supported package combines Google’s E-mail, calendar, and instant messaging with Web site creation software. It will be hosted in Google’s data center, branded with customers’ domain names, and packaged with management tools for IT pros.

That’s the first step. Later this year, Google plans to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheets to the suite, build online collaboration features that work across its applications, and market the whole package to large companies for a fee. Google will include IT-friendly features such as APIs, directory-server integration, guaranteed performance levels, and telephone tech support.

Instead of trying to displace the hundreds of millions of copies of Office installed on business PCs, Google will try to snare users once they start sharing the Word and Excel files they’ve created. “The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn’t necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel,” says Matt Glotzbach, head of enterprise products at Google. “They’re the collaboration component of that.”

That is probably their best shot, if they can get Office users to start using some of their software for collaboration before Microsoft releases theirs, they might be able to do something, but as for competing head to head with Microsoft, they are a long ways off, and, as most of their releases, this must still be in beta.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch says,

Customers clearly want Office documents stored on servers instead of, or in addition to, local storage. And while it’s not clear that there is great demand yet for online creation of documents (the experience is still nowhere near as good as the desktop products), the ability to collaborate on reviewing and editing documents is important, and this must occur online to be effective.

Well, they want Office documents stored on their own servers, not Googles, and this is already a piece of cake by sharing folders locally through the server, why would any business want to store their important documents on Googles datacenter? Have they conducted surveys to see what these people want, or is this just what they think they want?

Google and Microsoft are approaching this from very different positions. Google has a clean slate but has to play catch up in customer acquisition and in building compelling functionality. And while Microsoft has a lock on customers at this point, their need to protect a huge revenue stream puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Who wins this fight could very easily be settled in the next 12 months, after Office 2007 and Vista hit the market and Google fleshes out its offering. But regardless if the result is that the cost of creating office based documents falls, the consumer wins.

A distinct disadvantage? I don’t see it, at all. This clearly gives them the advantage over Google, as they will really have to create something new and unique to win over Office customers, or they are going to have to copy Microsoft’s software, which is what it appears everyone is doing so far. The best thing for them to do is the collaboration portion, as Microsoft has not released their collaboration effort, it will not come until Office 2007 ships.

I really like Techcrunch but I just have to wonder how much he got paid for this statement,

And while all of this is going on, Zoho is quietly building a really excellent online office suite of its own. Any of the other big guys could also quickly enter this game with a timely acquisition.

It just doesn’t fit and should not have even been included in the article, especially considering they are a sponsor.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google, Microsoft, Office 2.0, Web 2.0 No Comments » August 2006