Microsoft has been known to offer up a funny video from time to time to prove a point or just to poke fun at itself. Recently the company held its annual Global Exchange sales conference to help its sales reps sell Microsoft products. One of Microsoft"s efforts to help its sales reps at the conference better represent its new cloud based Office 365 software suite is shown above; a sitcom parody that features "GMail Man".
As first revealed by ZDNet, the video shows an actor playing the "GMail Man" as he goes through mail sent by users through Google"s GMail service. Microsoft makes the point that GMail can scan a user"s email and use certain keywords inside the email message. Then Google creates ad links and shows them to the users based on the keyword scan. The obvious message from Microsoft is that using its new Office 365 service keeps your email from that kind of keyword ad generating activity.
Microsoft officially launched Office 365 a few weeks ago, but just before its launch, Google decided to take some pot shots of its own at the expense of Microsoft"s new office software suite. Google listed a number of advantages that its cloud based services have over Microsoft, including being able to be used on any web browser, having just one price point per user versus a number of different prices for Office 365, and more. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft and Google will continue to take shots at each other over their cloud-based systems.