The common, popular narrative is that companies like Microsoft are eeeeevil. All they want is money! Or something like that. Maybe it's not so clear-cut?

I want to tell you that Skulls of the Shogun is excellent. Read…

This quote in the image above comes from a piece on Rock Paper, Shotgun on Skulls of the Shogun. (Edit: the quote comes from Borut Pfeiffer, who works for Plush Apocalypse Productions—a studio that collaborated with 17-BIT on Skulls of the Shogun). The article describes the trials and disappointments that came with developing a game exclusive to Microsoft products. Instead of having that exclusivity result in more exposure and sales, the move resulted in complications and an empty bank account.

They came across as though they were institutionally incompetent. I think they’re not really set up to be a decent publisher. I do feel slightly bad saying that, because there were people there who worked hard on our behalf, but at the same time there are systemic problems with the way that division is setup and run.

Of course, the developers knew they were taking a gamble that involved releasing a game on a bunch of new products—it's probably not fair to put all of the blame on Microsoft. Still, it's kind of impressive how incompetent Microsoft sounds, at least when it comes to doing well by indies. You can read specifics here; it's well worth a read.

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Google‘s decision to shut down Google Reader has left some in the tech world feeling battered and bruised.

 

For many power users, Reader was once the go-to application for keeping up with the news. Like many other RSS aggregators, Reader combined posts from multiple blogs and websites into a simple, inbox-like view. But there was something about Reader’s simplicity, as well its ease-of-access as a web application, that made it extremely popular among RSS users. Even though its popularity has waned in recent years, more than 70,000 people have signed a petition asking Google not to kill Reader on July 1.

 

I’m not one of the protesters who is desperately clinging to Reader, or to RSS in general. I migrated to using Twitter lists a couple years ago, and am therefore a prime example of why Google no longer sees the need to keep Reader going. So instead of mourning, I’m using this as a time of reflection. Here are a few takeaways on the end of Google Reader:

 

Alienating Your Base Rarely Works

 

I’m guessing Google didn’t want things to end this way. About a year and a half ago, Google launched a major redesign for Reader, changing the look, removing a note-taking feature and, most importantly, replacing the service’s built-in sharing with Google+ integration. It’s possible that Google saw potential in Reader as a big driver of traffic and links for its new social network.

 

But as Buzzfeed has noted, Reader already was a thriving social network, just not the one Google had in mind. Loyal users felt burned by the changes, and Google now cites declining usage as the main reason Reader is shutting down.

 

Maybe things would have been different had Google nurtured Reader’s community instead of abandoning it. Brian Shih, an ex-Googler who was a product manager for Reader, argues that the service could have blossomed. “But Reader at Google was pigeonholed as an RSS-reader explicitly, and didn’t have a chance to grow beyond that to explore that space,” he wrote on Quora.

 

Ironically, Digg now says it’s building an RSS reader to fill the void left by Google Reader. Now there’s a company that knows all about alienating its users and suffering the consequences.

 

No, You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For

 

Some tech pundits have used the demise of Reader to claim that free services are inherently less dependable than paid ones. “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on,” Dave Winer wrote. “Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles.”

 

Winer’s assertion sounds good, but it’s debatable. Paid services can go belly-up just as easily as free ones. Sometimes they get acquired and killed by a larger company (as with Apple and Lala or Google and reMail). Other times, they just fail to get a big enough audience to sustain themselves. (See, for instance, my run-ins with dead or dying streaming music services.) The logic that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” is pretty easy to tear apart.

 

Meanwhile, you’d have a hard time finding an Internet search provider that asks for any money, let alone one that’s as likely to stick around as long as Google. The same is true for social networks, web-based mail providers and countless other online services — including RSS readers.

 

Come Up with an Escape Plan

 

Since you can’t always predict which web services will still be around a few years from now, you may want to plan for the day when your most beloved services disappear. I’m not an expert on other RSS readers in particular, but Lifehacker has a good list of Google Reader alternatives. Don’t forget to grab your existing RSS data from Reader using Google Takeout. You can also try setting up Twitter lists or using news aggregation apps such as Flipboard, Zite and Pulse.

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Microsoft's anti-Google "Scroogled" campaign is a battle for hearts and minds as much as for search and email market share, an analyst said today, but its effectiveness can be measured.

"Scroogled is an attempt to change hearts and minds," said Peter LaMotte, an analyst with Levick, a Washington-based strategic communications consultancy. "In the same way that they are approaching this like an advocacy campaign, it makes sense to measure this like an advocacy campaign."

The campaign -- which started last November, kicked off a second run last month and will continue into the foreseeable future -- was called an advocacy effort by LaMotte two weeks ago.

"This is more than just an ad. This is a fully-realized advocacy campaign," LaMotte said then, ticking off similarities between Scroogled and the kind of political campaigns run by environmentalists and activists promoting constitutional or legislative changes. Both include not only traditional advertising, but also partisan-funded research, frequent polling and grassroots components like petitions.

"Microsoft can monitor sentiment," said LaMotte. "They can analyze what people think of Google versus Microsoft. They can measure what people are saying on Facebook and Twitter. There are plenty of tools that can show sentiment."

In fact, Microsoft is doing just that.

"One of the things we do track is brand perception," said Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's senior director of online services, and the executive who oversees Scroogled. "How much people like the Google brand, how much they trust the Google brand."

Those who rank Google highly -- not surprisingly -- are much harder to convince to try an alternative, say Microsoft's Bing rather than Google's search, or Outlook.com rather than Gmail, Weitz said.

He claimed that for those who visited the Scroogled.com website -- the current core of the campaign now that Microsoft's stopped advertising -- Google's brand reputation dropped by nearly a third.

"When people are exposed to Scroogled, we see a nearly 30% drop in Google's brand reputation," said Weitz. "We expose the truth of what's happening. Facts are facts. And people get upset when they learn them. So, yes, it does deprecate the [Google] brand, as well it should."

The facts -- Weitz's word -- were the essence of Microsoft's most recent anti-Google campaign, which claims that Gmail's machine-based reading of message content for ad displaying purposes is an invasion of privacy, and that Microsoft's Outlook.com, the rebranded Hotmail, does not do the same.

Weitz declined to comment when asked whether there was a direct link between the brand perception change and the attack ad nature of Scroogled, in other words that the latter was the cause of the former, not the argument Microsoft made.

Instead, he defended Scroogled against critics who decried the negative tone, and who urged Microsoft to make its case on the merits of its own Outlook.com.

"Mainstream is into technology, my Mom is getting into technology, but she doesn't care about [things like] specifications, the latency of a service or the colors being used or screen real estate. But she does care about someone reading her email," said Weitz.

A feature-by-feature comparison, said Weitz, might work with the technorati, but would fall flat when pitched to a broader group.

LaMotte, however, noted that while many may bemoan attack ads, there's evidence that they work. And Microsoft's before-and-after brand reputation measurement shows so.

"That's huge," said LaMotte of Microsoft's contention that Scroogled visitors' perception of Google plunged by 30%. "If it's accurate, that's a substantial change in sentiment in such a short span of time."

Others were unconvinced. "Three and a half million visitors is impressive, but not enough to register," said Mike Zammuto, president of Reputation Changer, an online reputation management firm. Reputation Changer has not seen any change in Google's rating post-Scroogled.

"Google has a fantastic brand -- there are only a small number of companies that have [brands that strong], Apple and Google are two -- so it's much harder for someone like Microsoft to put a dent in it," said Zammuto.

With an even broader campaign or one that lasted longer, Microsoft may be able to change perceptions, Zammuto said, "But this hasn't made any difference. Google's brand is too solid."

Microsoft's Weitz owned up to other measuring sticks he's using to evaluate Scroogled, ranging from social media and blog mentions to the number of petition signees.

The petition has accumulated 115,000 signatures, putting the response rate -- the percentage of the 3.5 million Scroogled.com visitors who have signed -- around 3.3%.

"That's very high for an email or online campaign," Weitz asserted. "And it's higher than a traditional marketing campaign."

He's right about email. According to a 2012 survey by the Direct Marketing Association (DHA), email campaigns average a response rate of just 0.12%.

But there are better bottom-line metrics than response rate or brand reputation that could be used to gauge Scroogled's efficacy.

"I feel in some ways I'm arguing counter to our first discussion, when I talked about the advocacy approach," said LaMotte. "But the goal here is the same for any advertising campaign. In a political campaign, the final result is that the candidate gets elected. Here, the bottom line is revenue, and their goal is conversion [from Gmail to Outlook.com]."

On that level, Scroogled hasn't shown much of anything, or better put, publicly-available metrics haven't shown a change.

comScore's search statistics -- the focus of the first Scroogled last November -- showed that Google increased its share by three-tenths of a percentage point to 67% in January, recouping an identical decline in December. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Bing grew its share by two-tenths of a point in January, ending that month with 16.5%, atop a one-tenth of a point increase in December.

Put in plainer words, 2012's Scroogled failed to move the needle on Google's search share. And while it may have played a part in the two-month boost to Bing, Microsoft's gains came at the expense of Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL, not Google.

There are no similar numbers available for possible share changes in Gmail, Outlook.com and other email services since Scroogled's latest debuted last month.

 

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