Microsoft has enlisted the reality-television series “Pawn Stars” in its ongoing campaign to bash rival Google.
An online video ad released Tuesday mimics the plot set up of “Pawn Stars,” which features people toting precious or odd objects for appraisal at a Las Vegas pawn shop. In Microsoft’s fictional telling, a woman is trying to trade in a Chromebook, a no-frills laptop powered by Google software.
“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste.”
Look, I’m not a huge Google cheerleader. Although I don’t like/hate them any more than any other giant tech company, I think if they completely took over desktop and mobile, it would be a thousand hells worse than anything Microsoft ever unleashed upon the world. But right now, MS is getting its ass handed to it, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s like the bully going home and crying to mommy when somebody gives them a taste of their own medicine. MS spent so long being dicks that karma is coming back around to bite them in the ass. Eventually, what goes around comes around.
Ass handed to them? Chromebooks? Lol, no.
I’ve used a Chromebook, and my immediate reaction was “wow, this is pretty sweet”. Then I hit the brick wall the video talks about: No wifi means no apps. It’s gotten better on that front recently with offline gmail and limited local storage; I tried Hexxeh’s Chromium OS build on my netbook and those features mostly worked, but I still went back to Slackware after just a few days. If I ever end up with a “real” Chromebook I’ll probably just wipe and install a more useful OS.
All that said, I live in a semi-rural area on the outskirts of Atlanta, so I’m not the target market for these devices anyway. Someone who is bathed in free wifi 24/7 would probably love it.
I just have to question the wisdom of Microsoft getting its ass handed to them by an OS which has worse sales than Windows RT.
They may very well be fantastic little laptops at awesome prices.
I agree, and I think RT is a good comparison point.
Hardware-wise, Chromebooks can be nice or they can be worse than first-gen netbooks. The Pixel is almost Apple-level nice, but the price is a huge turnoff. The sub-$300 Chromebooks are hit or miss, with a lot of misses.
I would definitely rather have an RT based device than a Chromebook, as the two stand today.
This hits the weakness common to all vendors – no exception (as far as I am aware).
Having web-apps and using cloud storage works fine in an urban area well served in all kings of wireless networking connections.
However – not so in a rural area.
Maybe, rather than trying to bash each others, Apple, Google, and Microsoft would be better (for us, the users), to come-up with a common API set capable of transparently dealing with the loss of wireless connectivity once one travels away from urban centers and major highways. That would be money well spent.
Have you checked out http://hood.ie/ ?
I haven’t looked at the framework itself, but it specifically targets this scenario, and I hold the people behind it in very high regard.
I don’t understand this argument really. If you don’t have wifi, what is it you are doing on your computer? If I am not at home or at work, I’m not doing anything on my computer. Do you guys go out in the wilderness and need to do some spreadsheets or what?
I think for 90% of people, the only time they use their computer is when they would have internet. Still I think the models with 200MB free internet make a lot of sense, and in some cases don’t cost much more.
Please stop this lame strawman argument.
Nothing lame or “strawman” about it, no matter how much you, with your narrow point of view, want it to be. Fact is, a Chromebook is a computer designed to be used strictly online. If you try to use one offline, it’s no longer useful. On the contrary, if I take my netbook to a place with no internet, I can still do around 80% of what that computer’s OS allows. I can do some coding, I can play games, I can write prose, I can edit graphics, and so on. With a Chromebook, no internet means nearly none of that is possible. On my netbook, no internet means a very minor inconvenience.
Think outside the box, there’s more to the computing world than looking at cat pictures and trolling discussion groups.
That’s actually not true. Chrome apps can use local storage:
– Angry Birds for example can be installed locally.
– QuickOffice works offline on locally stored documents.
– Google Keep also allows to read and edit notes.
Of course it’s still mainly targeted for online use. But depending on what you want to do while being offline the gap between a Chromebook and a classic laptop is quite narrow. At least that’s my experience during the last couple of weeks when I had both with me on train rides and flights.
(As an experiment I have written this on a C7 Chromebook with turned off wifi. Editing and preview just works. Now let’s get back online…)
Edited 2013-11-29 18:37 UTC
Look up, I actually said that too in my original comment above the one you replied to. But it’s just not the same thing as a true, fully useful OS.
My point though, is that you’re just not going to do any serious work with one sans internet. You’re not going to do any real development, and I’d be nervous about trusting my WIP fiction and non-fiction projects to such a flaky device.
But again, I’m not the normal use-case for one of these. I’m much better served by a full OS, and I’ve already said that for people with reliable, 24/7 wifi wherever they go, a Chromebook is a great device.
Apps != OS
– If a Chrome app does not offer offline operation it is not the fault of the OS.
– If a Windows application does not use network access (e.g. for updates) it is not the fault of the OS.
A Chromebook is by default flaky? I do not see why. If the SSD in a Windows netbook dies the work is lost just the same.
So I can perfectly understand that a Chromebook does not work you. But I do think that it is a matter of available applications and not necessarily of the OS.
On an OS that was never originally designed for offline operation, and had to be modified to provide it, yes it can be. I don’t understand your insistence that Chrome OS is somehow meant to be a full, traditional desktop OS. It’s not; it was designed from the beginning to be an online-only OS. Just because Google finally hacked together a kludgy persistence feature, due to overwhelming complaints, doesn’t mean it’s suddenly a full fledged general purpose OS. You seem to desperately want it to be something it isn’t and was never meant to be. There’s nothing wrong with Chrome OS being what it was made to be: An online-only (or now, online-mostly) OS. All I’ve ever said here is that it’s not for everyone, which is true of any OS.
As the nature of a Chromebook is to be online all the time, and it doesn’t work at its full potential when it’s without wifi, yes it is a flaky device for doing important work. My statement had nothing to do with hardware reliability and everything to do with the inability of the OS to perform as it should despite loss of internet connection. I’m really not sure how you inferred SSD issues from that.
Exactly: Applications that no longer become available when you lose internet is a problem. When the OS was designed to only run online applications, you have an ecosystem where the app you want to run offline may not have that functionality yet. That is a problem stemming from the design of the OS. Maybe one day the app you need to run offline will gain that functionality, but that’s up to the developer. Meanwhile, a normal app running on a normal OS will function just fine, just as it always has.
Once more, you seem to think I hate or have something against Chromebooks. I don’t; I think they are amazing little devices. But they simply aren’t for everyone, and trying to argue that they are is a pointless waste of time.
But isn’t this a contradiction? If it only works while online how can it run at all (albeit without full potential) when offline?
If a Chromebook would simply display an error message when offline I would agree but it doesn’t. Chrome apps -or HTML5 apps generally- have the capability to work offline if they use local storage. Google actually provides apps which are dedicated for offline use. ChromeOS can save files locally and you can work on them offline, e.g. editing a spreadsheet with QuickOffice.
We are on the same page here 😉 But I think the reasoning leading to this conclusion is different.
And: no offence taken. I hope the same goes for you and you enjoy this discussion.
You seem to be deliberately oversimplifying what I said. I never said it wouldn’t power on or display anything without wifi, and I seriously doubt you innocently inferred that. As I’ve said above, I have not only used official Chromebooks, I’ve also installed Chromium OS onto commodity hardware. I know intimately how the OS works.
While there is some very limited functionality sans wifi (and with every update this situation improves), the fact remains that it simply is not a general purpose OS — yet. That’s point I’ve made over and over, yet you do end runs around that point.
None taken here either, I’m just at a loss to try to understand your line of reasoning. A Chromebook is a Chromebook, and computer with a standard (non-Google) OS is simply a different kind of device with a different user base. Maybe one day Chrome OS will become a general purpose OS…but then, what would be the point? It’s great at what it was designed for.
Not on desktop, but on mobile, and on the web. And I guess you might say Office as well. They’re just not the giant behemoth they used to be.
Edited 2013-11-27 00:35 UTC
They have an unshakable domination on the Desktop, in mobile their seeing increased success, and Office is crushing Google’s offerings especially Office365.
Office is especially hilarious though, Microsoft was able to reinvent a new business model, turn it into a two billion dollar business, and laugh all the way to the bank before Google even knew what happened.
So Microsoft dominate a shrinking desktop market. Down 11.2% since 2012.
They have managed to increase their mobile OS market share 156%. Which sounds awesome but then you read that it went up from 2.3% in 2012 to 3.7% in 2013.
Their search engine is so bad that it has to use Google to improve it’s results and their best product is an on-line version of Office. Personally I disagree, I think Office 365 is overpriced and their best offering for me is Exchange on-line but that is just my opinion.
So tell me, if Microsoft are doing so well then why have they started with this smear campaign against Google? It must be that famous Microsoft civic duty we hear about all the time.
P.s Below I’ve listed my sources. Sources are how you let people know that you are talking about hard facts instead of wishful thinking mixed in with a unhealthy dose of fanboyism.
Sources:
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2610015
http://www.businessinsider.com/bing-is-cribbing-from-google-search-…
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24442013
You are making little semantic sense. Again talking out of emotion, rather than sense.
And I’m pretty sure that Google knew that it’s going to be hard fighting Microsoft’s Office dominance, as I suspect that they have read The Innovator’s Solution. Fortunately for Microsoft, they also have read that book and all they had to do it close the gap to remain the leaders.
The OP said that Microsoft was getting its ass handed to them in Office, something that’s laughable.
Of course Google knew it’d be hard, but that’s an aside because I’m not commenting on that. I’m mentioning the speed at which Microsoft adjusted its strategy and killed the Google Docs baby in the cradle.
Well… not bad. You got 1 out of 4 correct.
As far as I read that comment, nothing is stating that CHROMEBOOKS are handing MS’ ass to them.
MS’ grandiose schemes in general are all just falling down on their own. Of course, they have plenty of decent revenue streams. But clearly MS has a weird psychology of being unhappy when other companies find success, regardless of whether that is actually competing or threatening their own current success/niche.
That Chromebooks are a minor part of the market and not really taking over the world in their current form is exactly the point of why this negative campaign is such a joke and revealing of the state of MS. Why should MS bother to attack Chromebooks in the first place? That they are really says something about MS, more than Chromebooks.
Edited 2013-11-27 09:30 UTC
The money would be better spent getting those Metro “apps” included in Windows on par with the ones from Windows Live and Mango. Except the calendar app on WP, it’s awful.
Well, Microsoft’s taste notwithstanding, they are unfortunately pretty much dead-on. The Chromebook is essentially useless without an internet connection, and truly pervasive and reliable internet access wherever you go is still a long way off.
That being said, I also hate Microsoft’s current offerings, and I sincerely wish that 8.9″ netbooks would come back.
Edited 2013-11-27 04:48 UTC
And worse, when you have an internet connection they are only marginally useful. I have a samsung chrome book and really tried to use it. The price was right and the battery life is great as well as the boot time. But it just sucks to use. The simplest things I would do on a regular desktop (presentations, spreadsheets, remote desktop, easy access to dropbox, some light image editing, etc) is all just impossible or really poor imitation of the real thing. I basically use it for a netflix box in bed, and even that is marginal because of the budget screen.
It’s pretty much gathering dust. I thought I could save some bucks for an auxiliary travel device but the quality just isn’t there. When I travel I just take my bluetooth keyboard with me and use the iPhone for everything. It does a better job than the chrome book for most things.
Edited 2013-11-27 07:50 UTC
I run regular desktop Linux on my Chromebook, pretty good deal if you ask me.
I’d say that in today’s world not having an internet connection makes any computing device barely useful.
At first I misread it as Porn Stars and though “woah, that’s different”. Then I read “Pawn Stars” and went “who?”.
The way Microsoft choose to advertise this past years is pretty pathetic. Instead of promoting their products (which sonetimes look nice and have interesting features) all they do is pick on Apple, Google and Android products. To me, they come off as petty and desperate. I hope the new CEO will change the advertising strategy and fire the awful agency they have now.
You think that Elop had no hand in Nokia ad campaign?
He probably did and for Microsoft’s sake I hope he’s not the next CEO.
I find your optimism unfounded.
I don’t know if optimism would be the right word since I don’t care about Microsoft.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I should be rooting against his selection because I don’t think he’s a good ceo, or if i should be rooting for his selection because it would be interesting to see Microsoft’s downfall.
‘Hanging on is quiet desperation is the Microsoft way’
apologies to Pink Floyd and Dark Side fans myself included(I was at the 1st ever performance of it 20-Jan-1972)
but to ‘dis’ a competitors product like this is a sign of (IMHO) desperation in the redmond camp.
My general impression of any company that trash talks about there competition is two things:
– They have little faith in their product succeeding so they try and make their competitors fail more.
– They are just a pathetic company, they have no class.
This goes for Apple’s Mac Vs PC, Samsung’s barrista cracking adverts and this from Microsoft.
You start talking about the competition the conversation stops being about you and about your competitor.
Maybe this goes over better in the States, but here it sounds like they are arses.
They probably notice this behavior in comment sections all over the web, figure they might be able to invoke some positive association by stooping to the internet’s level.
Its political BS that’s found its way into technology.
First, that worked great with netbooks when Windows was a “must have” OS, but it looks kind of silly (and sadly desperate) now that Windows has a shrinking minority of the consumer market.
Second, if ChromeOS is “pathetic”, why would Microsoft even offer “Chrome fighter” incentives? Did I miss the “Debian fighter” incentives, or the “Haiku fighter” incentives? Microsoft has inadvertently granted a huge endorsement to Google’s desktop competitor.
In fact, they seem to be advertising more against an array of interesting Google products rather than for their own languishing products – or maybe it’s just that Microsoft’s ads for Google products are more interesting than Microsoft’s ads for their own products.
Yep, they should fire their ad agency today.
I think generally it’s best to avoid mentioning competitors. Quite obviously at a most basic level you’re providing them with free advertising. However in some instances it does make sense. The old “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC†campaign was great.
– Apple was coming back form obscurity
– Apple was the underdog and mentioning MS in the ad raised Apple’s profile by taking on the dominant force in the industry.
– Apple was redefining itself as cool against the an MS that was getting stale. because..
– Apple was pitching it’s benefits and comparing them to the status quo.
– It was funny (ish). It was mocking MS without being belligerent.
This MS ad however ticks all the wrong boxes:
– a big company calling out another big company is just acknowledging they’re in the same league
– It’s not funny
– It’s very forced and awkward
– No mention of what makes MS good, only what makes Google bad.
It comes off as desperate and awkward.
Ads are are largely subjective but one can objectively (through sales figures, audience reactions, etc) say the “Iâ€m a Mac, Iâ€m a PC†campaign worked well for Apple. Also, one can can subjectively say the MS’s Pawn Star ad is just terrible. (shame because I quite enjoy the pawn stars show).
I fondly enjoyed those “I’am a Mac, I’m a PC” ads.
I also remember an earlier message – “Mac’s works right out of the box”. As a parent, I could relate to the poor dad opening up a new computer and setting up the internet connection and his son simply saying “I’m going over to his friends because they got a Mac”.
When refering to competitors in advertisement, it seems that focusing on the strength of the product (whether imaginary or real) and with some humour has more lasting impacts than attack/negative ads.
On the other hand, if software giants and politicans alike would take note of this, then there would not be much left to bash at?
That is slightly different to when a bigger player mentions a smaller player.
Apple needed to show that they can compete with Windows systems, because they are a smaller player in the market. Droid Does commercials needed to show that they can compete with iPhone.
Mentioning or implying your competitor works only when you are comparing your product and pointing out something better or equivalence. Otherwise it’s free advertising to a smaller competitor.
I really think that, in part, one of the problems with Microsoft is that there is a generation inside it that was trained as a salesman/evangelist with the “Art of War” by Sun Tzu.
That turned the salesman to be very aggressive in a bad way. And sometimes we tend to block aggressive/pushy people.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120829013937/