Gmail Intervention; Microsoft’s Mudslinging

Gmail recently created a humorous site, http://www.emailintervention.com/, to encourage people to switch from inferior email clients to Gmail. Not only does it have a humorous video, but it allows users to send pre-formatted letters to friends with tones such as “I’m here to help,” “I’m worried about you,” and even “you’re embarrassing me!”

A quite amusing and interesting tactic–not just providing a video people want to share with others, but a system to encourage people to pass it on to their friends and say what they’ve been wanting to say all this time… “it’s time to upgrade.” In my opinion, Gmail is the best email choice.

Microsoft, attempting to compete with Google in both search and online office suites, doesn’t find it funny. They came up with their own rebuttal video, about how “Gmail-man” invades your privacy.

Their one and only point, made over and over laboriously in the short video, is that they say it’s wrong to have unobtrusive text ads, based on the content of your emails, showing in the browser. The Microsoft solution? A paid email service, Microsoft 365. Never mind that Gmail’s paid equivalent, Google Apps for Business, also has ads disabled. Why not advertise Hotmail, their free email service? Look at the Hotmail inbox with their graphical ads, versus Gmail with their text ads, and most consumers will prefer Gmail, as the Search Engine Journal points out.

My personal opinion? If you’re going to have privacy qualms about an automated system the scans for keywords in emails to serve specific ads when loading a web page and does not store anything except non-identifying statistical data… then why would you store the content of every email and contact with an online service anyway? Either way, all your data is on their servers. If you can’t trust your email service to respect your privacy, then you have bigger concerns than text ads.

Not everyone agrees, though. A columnist on a website site focused completely on Microsoft and Windows says that “Microsoft’s Gmail Man Spoof Gets It Right” and describe’s Gmail’s advertising model as “suspicious.”

Of course, that’s big talk for a company the Wall Street Journal listed as one of the worst websites from a privacy perspective, giving it a “High” exposure index ranking. Google is listed as a “Low” exposure index ranking, underneath wsj.com themselves. Is that an in-depth analysis of real privacy risk to users of the email clients? No, but it is an interesting take on the privacy attitudes of the two companies.

What is certain is that both videos will stir up more debate and attention on online email services… and both focus on Gmail. The Microsoft video intensively reinforces Gmail’s branding, although they try to do so in a negative context. Still, many people will become quite familiar with Gmail’s red envelope now.

What do you think? Is The Gmail Intervention video hilarious, or annoying and offensive? Is Microsoft’s “Gmail Man” video funnier, or a flop? Do you think targeted text-based ads are better or worse than general graphical ads?