isn't it a "rule" or a "best practice" to mostly not give your competition the time of day in your advertising? why would you dedicate an entire 2.5 minute ad (and how every many thousands/millions of dollars that went into it) to talk about someone elses product?
Pretty sure Coke and Pepsi have been doing this for years. Absolutely know that Apple has been doing this for years and outside of their original iPod commercials the Mac vs PC commercials have been some of the most successful marketing campaigns in the company's history.
In other words, if anyone's telling you it's a "rule" or "best practice" they shouldn't be. It's a simple compare/contrast style of advertising, which is one of the foundations of persuasive writing and one of the most effective methods of persuasion as well. And at the end of the day, advertising is just a form of persuasive writing.
i dont give a shit about how bad google apps supposedly is - instead tell me about why i should fucking use word or powerpoint. this is terrible and it stinks of fear and desperation from a (kind of, not really yet) dying company
It doesn't seem like this ad is targeted to end users, but rather large corporate entities. So unless you're employing hundreds of people in a mostly traditional corporate structure, MS could give a fuck all what you think of this particular ad.
It only stinks of fear and desperation if you've never worked in an information sensitive industry. And I'm not talking about the IM world and your fucking email list information, but rather things like pharmaceutical development and high finance. The data in those fields is the basis of those industries. It's a very rare occasion that data, memos, and collaborative projects ever leave the company's intranet system.
ALL data capture and formulation systems have to be validated and secured. Google does drop shit and change stuff all the time. This CANNOT happen if you need to run on a validated system. Is MS the best option for this? Not all the time, but you always know what you have with MS once you set the system up and it can be validated. Shit, even excel sheets that are using formulas to calculate figures have to be validated before they can be used in some cases. With Google Apps something you've set up and is integral to your system could removed a month from now and that is not acceptable in a number of industries.
In the corporate world secured means "for our eyes only" and NEVER out of our control. Relying on Google to power your methods of data distribution, collection, or even relaying internal memos puts that information out of your control.
It also puts parts of your network system out of your control. When something goes wrong, it's much easier to find out what went wrong and who could have possibly accessed sensitive information when everything is stored and handled in-house.
For the most part I think Google does an awesome job. And for a large number of industries and businesses Google Apps would be just fine. But in industries where data privacy is paramount, the MS suite of productivity tools (not 365) is a better option than Google Apps. Are there better options than MS out there? Sure, but it depends on what you need, how much support you'll need, how much additional training your staff will need and about a half-million other factors.
And no, this isn't some uniformed opinion. I worked in pharma development for nearly a decade. If any data ever left the company campus, it was distributed to satellite facilities either through the secured company intranet or by a hard copy/hard digital copy by courier.
At the end of the day I go back to this: "MS could give fuck all what
you think of the ad." This was a direct attack on Google Apps being used in the corporate world, and their customers being used as what amounts to beta testers. MS could give two shits if it turns you off. You won't be signing a multimillion dollar contract to install thousands of copies of the Office suite/other MS products across your corporate network.
