14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has always had a well-developed sense of humor, so the Softies made fun of their rivals with pretty much every single occasion, regardless of whether we're talking about operating systems, search engines, smart phones, tablets, or cloud-based products.
This time, the software giant has decided to mock Samsung, after the world's number one smartphone manufacturer turned to a marketing stunt that impressed everyone last week.
Samsung signed a deal with Heathrow airport to take over Terminal 5 and rename it to “Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5” to obviously promote the company's latest smartphone and give passengers the chance to try it out before embarking on another flight.
Microsoft, on the other hand, used Samsung's campaign to promote its own devices and sent a team of so-called “Lumia Astronauts” at the Samsung terminal in order to find the gate that could send them to “The Galaxy.” Everyone could see where this was going, as the team couldn't find anything useful, so they made their way back to Redmond to play with their Windows Phone smartphones.
This might not be such an amusing way to mock your rivals, but it's pretty obvious that Microsoft is investing a lot of resources into its efforts to make Windows Phones successful, no matter if this involves traditional marketing or campaigns that would in the end make fun of the competition.
A similar effort, but at a completely different level, happened in the search engine industry where Microsoft tried to promote Bing as a much more effective alternative for Google Search.
The Bing It On campaign, which invited people to try out the Bing search engine and discover how relevant the results it provides actually are, coupled with the Scroogled program pushed Microsoft into a fierce dispute with Google, the search engine company that continues to lead the charts in this particular side of the market.
Google, however, has never lost the leading position in US search traffic, but Bing actually won some points, with some people admitting that Microsoft's service really provides better results than the competition.
The Scroogled campaign hasn't been updated in a while, which made many believe that Microsoft has actually decided to give up on its anti-Google efforts, but it remains to be seen whether the company is ready to haul down its colors or it's now working on another attempt to continue the fight.
We've reached out to Microsoft asking for some updates on the Scroogled campaign, so we'll update the article accordingly.