The company says that it's only criticizing rivals “when it makes sense”

May 29, 2014 09:14 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft launched the anti-Google Scroogled campaign more than a year ago, but the company has apparently slowed down its efforts to blast its long-time rival in the last few months, making people wonder whether the software giant finally had a change of heart regarding Google's alleged unfair practices.

It turns out that Scroogled isn't dead yet, even though the campaign hasn't been updated in a while. A company spokesperson told us that Microsoft's anti-Google campaign would be relaunched when it made sense, pointing out that Google wasn’t doing anything wrong at the moment.

And Microsoft does have a point. Google tweaked some of the products criticized as part of the Scroogled efforts and, although Microsoft still claims that not all privacy issues have been addressed, launching public attacks against the search company doesn't make much sense right now.

“We are always evaluating and evolving our marketing campaigns. There are times when we use our marketing to highlight differences in how we see the world compared to competitors, and the Scroogled campaign is an example of this. Moving forward, we will continue to use all the right approaches and tactics when and where they make sense,” a company spokesperson told us.

The Scroogled campaign was launched in late November 2012, with Microsoft accusing Google of hiding paid results among items displayed on the Shopping service.

“In their under-the-radar announcement, Google admits they've now built ‘a purely commercial model’ that delivers listings ranked by ‘bid price.’ Google Shopping is nothing more than a list of targeted ads that unsuspecting customers assume are search results. They call these ‘Product Listing Ads’ a ‘truly great search,’” Microsoft said at that time.

The Scroogled campaign has always been used by Microsoft to promote its very own products, including the Bing search engine and Outlook.com (as an alternative to Gmail). Obviously, the company says that it pays much more attention to privacy and many of its services have been tweaked to provide a cleaner experience, without ads in emails or paid links on the search engine results page.

As expected, Microsoft updated the campaign with every single occasion, blasting Google for the “unfair” practices it used to deliver and monetize ads, thus infringing users' privacy in several of its products.

The bottom line is that Microsoft hasn't yet abandoned the Scroogled campaign, so it's probably just a matter of time until Redmond launches another attack at its rival.

So you better watch out Google, Microsoft is here waiting for another bad move.