Microsoft splashes big bucks to blast Google Apps Microsoft is spending big bucks to convince computer users that Google Apps are a risky bet with a new series of ads featuring Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo star Rob Schneider and disgraced athlete and former jailbird Pete Rose – neither of whom presumably come cheap. Both adverts push Microsoft's contention that Google Apps can …
Just been through this last week, the MS ads rang a bell...
Last minute decision to pack all of the powerpoints onto an iPad for a show, Keynote corrupted them all irreperably, QuickOffice wasn't much better and Google Docs was hopeless... PDF to the rescue. :-S
Now I have the job of converting the last 10 years worth of presentations into Keynote for the next time and keeping the PowerPoint and Keynote presis in sync.
Dishonourable cheat concerning Pete Rose is actually not totally true (concerning baseball anyway) he was banned from the hall of fame for gambling but he gambled that his teams were going to win not that they were going to lose. Many people in the states feel that he should be allowed into the hall of fame especially considering that the hall of fame rule was put in place after he was kicked out.
The tax evasion mentioned was from before this occurred in 1985 and 87 and was caused by his gambling addiction.
Just figured I would throw this info out there as many Brits will have no clue who Pete rose is. He is still I believe the all time hits leader in baseball history which is kinda a big deal.
I managed 4, but I ended up doing so much collaboration work with companies using MS Office, that it was embarassing. I started with an XP/Office 2003 machine in the corner to check formatting, before sending documents out, but it became simpler to abandon my Linux workstation for document creation and do it on the XP machine.
OO.o and LibreOffice are great products and Google Docs isn't bad, as long as you don't need the advanced features they lack and you don't need to exchange documents with MS Office users. The documents I now have to generate can't even be displayed in Google Docs, because it doesn't support most of the features I use.
It is a shame, because on simple documents, the collaboration features are great.
I keep an XP VM with Office installed around just for this purpose. I actually have Office:mac 2011 too but if I was still purely on Linux, either Office on XP in VirtualBox or Crossover Office would do the trick for running MS tool without borking my entire life by having to run that dog's breakfast that is Windows for everything.
When MS ignored Google Docs, there was the impression that MS Office was the real stuff and Google was the "unprofessional stuff"" on the www, although many people are actually using it and finding it useful.
By taking an adversarial position, MS have actually endorsed Google Docs as being a serious enough contender to fear. I think this will backfire on MS because - apart from some cheesy ads, they really don't really put forward any rational reasons why Office is better.
Would a 6000x250 spreadsheet work any better on Office 365 though? Somewhat doubt it.
There's still a place for local processing, even if everyone (MS most definitely included) wants you to go to the cloud, mostly so they can charge subscription fees - does anyone else think that we're sleepwalking back into the mainframe era?
"El Reg just isn't sure the current tactics of using a dishonorable cheat and a cinematic man-whore is the way to do it."
Like attracts like ... birds 'n feathers flockin' together ... chickens home to roost ... flies to shite ... crap actors for a crap corporation ... what's the doubtful tactics here?
Not really. I don't like the adverts and I'm glad such adverts would never get approved over here, but they aren't FUD.
Google Docs is great, as long as you don't need advanced features. If you have simple document needs and want good collaboration, then Google Docs is a great product. If you need advanced features and formatting, then you need a "real" Office suite. OO.o is streets ahead of Google Docs, but still has a lot of compatibility problems.
If you regularly need to share documents with companies using MS Office, there is no real alternative, if you don't want to look unprofessional or make yourself a lot of extra work.
The same works the other way, of course, if you have clients that use Google Docs, you don't really have a choice, but to work on Google Docs with them.
> If you regularly need to share documents with companies using MS Office, there is no real alternative, if you don't want to look unprofessional or make yourself a lot of extra work.
The vast majority of the time, you are sending them something to read and not edit.
In this case, something like an editable format is usually the wrong thing to send.
We have had PDF as an open presentation standard since about 1991. That is the proper format to be using.
Sending something to a customer assuming that they have some "specialised" software to read it is downright inconsiderate.
Companies who can't deliver often turn to demonizing their competition to make sales.
Besides, M$ keeps intentionally tweaking their products to prevent interoperability with other professional tools. It's a big world and if M$ isn't willing to make their business software tools interactive with all that's out there then there's no place for M$ in the larger scheme of things.
It has become impossible for Microsoft to escape the sleazy marketing tactics used in the past in lame attempts to discredit Linux, and other GPL licensed Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) with disastrous results. This is not politics Ballmer, where spewing feces sometimes works. People want reliable, secure "workable" technology.
Whenever a company of that size, and bank roll resorts to throwing crap against the other guy to show your crap is less distasteful, something is seriously wrong. Microsoft needs to spend those gazillions of dollars improving their software, so that Windows 8 users are not going nuts in frustration as well as getting Internet Explorer (IE), Windows security Essentials and Windows OS overall - desktops and Servers to "not suck so much".
Such honestly should surely get them some credit from customers.
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Microsoft ads probably start life as decent ideas at the agency (unless the creatives are so defeated by previous rejections that they self-censor) and then get strained through the mesh of corporate politics and researched to death.
This is pretty typical of big (especially US) brands I've worked on. The resulting kludge often barely makes sense.
Microsoft example breaches a cardinal rule of comparative or "knocking" copy. You don't do it if you're brand leader because it just promotes less known brands -- and the consumer will see them as comparable with your own.
Microsoft's main development vector still seems to hinge on making sure that user data is securely locked into their "experience ecosystem" or whatever they're calling their magic spectacles these days.
It's possible that customers will eventually figure out that when Microsoft says "the other guy's software won't read your data," they really mean "we scrambled your data and you paid us for it, suckers."
So that advert tells you to make sure you create the original document in something other than Microsoft Office as it will have problems displaying on other people's systems.
Use a standard and you'll be fine or create it using a free alternative such as Libre Office then anyone can view it for free if they have an internet connection and a few minutes to download and install the software.
@AC11:38: "Use a standard and you'll be fine or create it using a free alternative such as Libre Office then anyone can view it for free if they have an internet connection and a few minutes to download and install the software"
Um, Docx (and the other modern Office files) are ISO standards. I know the freetard brigade like to pretend they aren't, but that doesn't make it true. Google's document renderer may be a bit crappy, but maybe you should whinge at them to be a bit more standards compliant, eh?
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