Scroogled? Not cool Microsoft, you have let your fans down

Summers are here again. The advent of summers also means a sharp increase in consumption of water in every household. Let us assume seeing this increase of water consumption at home, you wish to purchase a new water purifier. After doing your primary research, you zeroed in to two brands- Kent and Aquaguargd. Both Kent and Aquaguard are respected names in the business in India and also have good brand image apart from very good products. So you go to authorized dealers of both the brands so that you can decide on which product to buy and make the purchase. You first go to the store of one of the two brands; they show their product, tell you the features and give all other details. Now you go to the competitor brand store showroom and they start off saying- “the other company’s purifier is a pathetic product. It doesn’t purify your water completely which gives you a stomach ache….” What if such a thing happened? Something very similar is happening between Microsoft and Google- two market giants and it is getting ugly- the website scroogled.com is a running testimony of this. Go to Scroogled.com and amuse yourself. You will get tabs saying “Home” “Get the facts”  “how they do it” and “our position”. Then there is one big notice with a warning sign, saying “Google shares your personal information with app makers”. Then you get “watch video to see how you get scroogled”. But the worst of it all comes just below this on the page- you have two buttons for “Set Bing as homepage” and “explore windows phone”!! This? Appalling. I don’t know why, but I have a very strong suspicion that the word “scroogled” has been made by combining the words- screw and googled. As bizarre and pathetic as it sounds, I have this suspicion. To start with, though I am not sure, I believe that there could well be some truth in the facts. Google does have a lot of my private information and I do click on a lot of “I agree” buttons without paying much of an attention to its contents. You can’t get a single cool stuff in your cell phone without having to agree once. And that probably is the source of the stunt that Microsoft has pulled. A good or at least ethical sales man sales man tries to sell his product by telling the features and benefits of his product and hence putting his product in a light brighter than the competitors- not by pulling the competitors down. Some might say what if there was actually some fault in the product that the customer deserves to know? Fair enough. In such a case, the salesman needs to be subtle and responsible. He is in possession of information that can affect another person if not divulged- he should politely reveal the information in a dignified manner- maybe he could also ask the customer to check on his own because he is not too sure.  What he should certainly not do is, making that information a sales tool- because it makes a rather cheap sales tool. It reeks of desperation. With this website, Microsoft is behaving like a kid- a kid who had an ice cream cone and was very happy with it till the time she saw another kid with a larger ice cream cone and she started crying. It will not be surprising if this strategy of Microsoft boomeranged into them. This may well send a message that Microsoft is so much frustrated with a decline in their sales that they have resorted to a cat fight in Public Domain. Whatever may be the consequences, such an act is not expected from any respected firm- least from a market leader and industry giant. Not cool Microsoft, you have let your fans down.  About the Author: Pranjal Srivatsava is a mechanical engineer from NIT Jamshedpur, who loves books and likes to see life through his own applied laws. Regular writer and contributor at GingerChai Networks, his other articles can be read at GingerChai.com His love for good food, books and writing keep him balance the rigorous demands of the corporate world. ]]>