Microsoft, Google swap April Fools' jabs

Microsoft spoofs Google's minimalist search site, Google knocks Outlook.com with 'Gmail Blue'

Microsoft today took another shot at rival Google, the target of its "Scroggled" campaign, with an April Fools' Day prank that turned its Bing search engine into a Google look-alike.

Dubbed "Bing Basic" in an April 1 blog post, and claiming it was a special test, the prank kicks off "if you visit bing.com and enter a certain telltale query" that then results in "something a little more bland."

From Bing.com, users simply enter "Google" to see a temporary home page that looks very much like Google's noted minimalist design.

"We decided to go back to basics, to the dawn of the Internet, to reimagine Bing with more of a 1997, dial-up sensibility in mind," wrote Michael Kroll, principal UX (user experience) manager for Bing, on the blog. "We may see some uptick in our numbers based on this test, but the main goal here is just to learn more about how our world would look if we hadn't evolved."
Bing basic
Microsoft's bogus "Bing Basic" takes a shot at rival Google's stark search engine UI.

SearchEngineLand first reported on the "Google" trigger for the Bing Basic hoax.

The revamped Bing Basic screen sports a few differences from Google's real home page, including a renaming of the latter's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button to "I'm Feeling Confused." Clicking on that button in Bing's imitation leads to Kroll's blog post.

Microsoft has retained Bing's hover-links, however, and used them to take additional shots at the competition. Hovering the mouse over one such link displays a pop-up that states, "When there's nothing else to look at ... You may take drastic measures." Clicking directs the user to a search for "watching paint dry."

Google's counter -- launched earlier in the day -- was both more elaborate and more subtle as it spoofed Microsoft's Outlook.com email service, the rebrand of Hotmail.com that debuted last July.

Called "Gmail Blue," the phony is purportedly a major refresh of Google's own email service that "Richard Pargo," supposedly a project manager, says was based on the question, "How do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same?"

The result? Gmail Blue, with blue fonts, blue lines, blue theme, blue everything.

"It's Gmail, only bluer," said Pargo with a straight face in a production-quality video that included a cameo by Blue Man Group.

"We tried orange, brown ... brown was a disaster," said "Dana Popliger," a faux lead designer. "We tried yellow."

While some have interpreted Google's gag as a shot fired at Windows 8 -- both directly at the summer's upcoming upgrade, code named "Blue," as well as critics' take on the new OS, which makes a radical change of user interfaces (UIs) in one part, while retaining the traditional desktop in the other -- it could also be seen as a bashing of Outlook.com, which by default features a blue theme.

"I think the first thought that's going to come to the end-user's mind is, 'I can't believe I waited this long for this,'" concluded "Carl Branch," labeled as lead engineer.

Not coincidentally, today was Gmail's ninth anniversary. Google launched its invitation-only beta of the service on April 1, 2004.

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Microsoft enlists Dell to push Office 365 on new PCs

Dell is only one of top three OEMs to bundle Office 365 Home Premium with new consumer computers

Some major computer makers are pushing Office 365 with their new PCs, but others have stuck with a more traditional bundling tactic of including a factory-installed, single-license trial.

"[Microsoft is] very clearly heading towards driving every consumer towards the Office 365 option that they can, in the hopes of a subscription," said Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, in an interview Wednesday.

Of the top three computer vendors -- OEMs, for original equipment manufacturers -- only Dell offers Office 365 Home Premium, the consumer-grade subscription plan, with new machines. When a customer orders a customized PC, Dell offers a 30-day free trial to Office 365 Home Premium by default.

Microsoft offers the same 30-day trial on its website. The trial requires the customer to provide a credit card, which is charged if the plan isn't canceled within the trial period.

Dell customers can also add a one-year subscription to Office 365 to the PC's price, or one of the perpetual license versions of Office 2013.

Both Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, the No. 1 and No. 2 PC OEMs last quarter by IDC's estimate, instead offer a factory-installed 30-day trial to Office 2013 (HP) or will add a paid copy of Office 2013 to the PC's hard drive (Lenovo).

The route taken by those OEMs was traditional, in that computer makers have long included Office on new PCs, either automatically as a trial or by customer request as a paid option, then collected a percentage of sales from Microsoft.

In fact, when Office 2010 launched three years ago, Microsoft supported the promotional tactic with a new way to acquire the suite. Called "product key codes" (PKC), they were 25-character activation keys sold at retail. At prices between $120 and $350, a PKC transformed a trial into a working version of Office 2010. PKCs were sold without DVD installation media and also acted as replacements for the dropped "upgrade" editions.

PKCs are also available for Office 2013 for between $120 and $360.

But Dell took a different tack, instead going with Office 365.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has also taken that approach with its own tablet, the Surface Pro: Buyers who opt to purchase a one-year subscription to Office 365 Home Premium at the same time they order a Surface Pro receive a $20 discount.

"I anticipate this is their move forward," said Miller, of Microsoft's pushing Office 365 with a discount at hardware purchase time.

Microsoft has, of course, taken other steps to promote Office 365, especially Home Premium, which is aimed at consumers, a market Microsoft wants to shift toward a "rent-not-own" software model.

Dell bundles a 30-day trial of Office 365 Home Premium with new consumer PCs. (Image: Dell)

The company has tilted the field toward Office 365 by raising prices of the "perpetual" licenses -- those the customer pays for once, then uses as long as desired -- and by limiting rights to permanently tie those licenses to a specific PC.


Miller was unsure how well an Office 365-with-a-new-PC concept would do, including how many subscribers Microsoft would acquire and what the retention rate will be as renewal fees come due.

But by including Office 365 with a new system, particularly if the subscription is discounted rather than offered as a limited-time trial, Microsoft and OEMs may have hit on a solid strategy. "There's some deep psychology involved," Miller said, on the part of customers forced to make the decision at PC purchase time.

They're already plunking down hundreds, perhaps more than $1,000, on the machine, so an additional $80 or $100 may not be as painful then as it would seem later.

"It becomes up to the OEM to close that deal ... but I think it's easier to close that sale at the point of purchase than it would be later," Miller said.

What Microsoft would like to do is train customers to add Office to every new PC -- the restrictive perpetual license that's anchored to a single PC, and only to that PC, is one hint of its thinking -- but through the carrot of Office 365.

"Buy a new PC, tack on $100 [for Office]," Miller said, outlining Microsoft's thinking. "A year later, buy another new PC, tack on another $100 [for Office]." With that in mind, customers will start to believe Office 365 is a good deal, whether it really is. The result, said Miller: Microsoft nudges consumers to buy into a form of Software Assurance, the annuity-like program that many corporations use to keep their Microsoft software up to date.

The strategy of offering Office 365 at a discount and pushing that rather than a perpetual license could be an even bigger boon to Microsoft as tablets replace PCs, Miller argued. That relies on several assumptions: That people buy new tablets more frequently than they once did PCs, and that Office 365 is a requirement for Microsoft's suite on non-Windows tablets, such as Apple's iPad and those powered by Google's Android. Office 365's ability to assign Office to any of five household devices, then reassign them later to new, replacement PCs or tablets, may prove to be its strongest selling point as consumers, in Miller's words, "rotate out" new hardware for old.

But there are as many, if not more, unknowns than knowns.

"I think this point-of-purchase mechanism will result in subscriptions, at least for Year One," said Miller. "The question is, what does retention/churn look like at the annual renewal? We'll have to wait and see."

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Windows 8 is both more and less popular than Windows 7

It all depends on what numbers you look at

Last week Microsoft put out an encouraging statistic about the popularity of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system: it’s been downloaded twice as many times as Windows 7 had been at this point in its development.

Happy news for proponents of the new touch-friendly platform, given the rousing reception Windows 7 received in the wake of Vista.

BACKGROUND: Windows 8 preview popularity kicking Windows 7's butt
But a different stat crops up today from a Computerworld colleague, Greg Kaiser, who compares the number of Windows 8 machines actually accessing the Internet to the number of Windows 7 computers accessing the Internet at the same point in its development. His result: only half the number of Windows 8 users accessed the Internet vs. Windows 7 users, based on numbers from Net Applications, a Web analytics company.

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That puts a different spin on things. Downloads don’t necessarily mean that the downloaded software is being used.

It’s even more complicated than that. If the download numbers are a good indication of general interest in Windows 8, those numbers are healthy. If just a quarter of those downloads were used in the past week to access the Internet it could be people don’t like it and have tossed it aside.

Or maybe the downloads are being used offline for testing, so don’t show up as accessing the Internet.

Or perhaps the performance of Windows 8 on machines designed for Windows 7 isn’t up to expectations so people waiting for better machines.

So perhaps the outlook isn’t that dismal for Windows 8.

On the flip side, what if both sets of numbers are accurate? Then there’s twice as many downloads of Windows 8 Consumer Preview out there as there were downloads of Windows 7 Beta, according to the Microsoft numbers. Yet Windows 8 is in use by just half as many machines as Windows 7 was, according to the Net Applications number. It’s hard not to interpret that as damning for Windows 8.

Something is stopping potential customers from bridging between download and extended use, and whatever it is has to be worrying Microsoft. Windows 8 takes a bold new direction for the company, embracing touchscreens, a new user interface style, and a new programming platform. The stakes are high. The numbers indicate something has gone wrong or at least not terribly right so far.

It’s not time to despair and Microsoft won’t – yet. The only meaningful numbers about Windows 8’s popularity will be how quickly and how widely it is adopted once it’s released in its final form.

This situation will boost the importance of Windows 8 Release Preview when it becomes available the first week in June because it will be one of the last chances Microsoft has to tweak the platform and boost its popularity before the final version is released.

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