Description: Microsoft launched another anti-Google video this Valentine’s day as part of its “Scroogled” campaign. It’s not often that tech companies try to smear the competition, so why is Microsoft doing this now?

Source: TechCrunch

Date: February 10th, 2013

“Don’t want Google snooping on your Valentine?” That’s the question Microsoft is asking today in its latest “Scroogled” video. Last week, Microsoft picked up its anti-Google campaign to put the spotlight on privacy and the fact that Gmail looks at your email’s content to better target its contextual ads. Those ads were, to put it mildly, very aggressive. For Valentine’s day, Microsoft just launched a new ad that shows the evil “Gmail Man” opening and reading love letters as he delivers them to their recipients (though on a positive note, he does throw some random coupons into them to sweeten the deal). The Outlook postman, naturally, just delivers the letters without looking at them. Read Rest of Story

Questions for discussion:

1. What are the intentions behind Microsoft’s negative “Scroogled” campaign?

2. Why isn’t Microsoft just focusing on its own positive features and software speed?