Someone at Microsoft makes fun of Alphabet's webpage

Aug 12, 2015 07:47 GMT  ·  By

Yesterday's big news was all about Google, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a new company called Alphabet, which is now the owner of the search service and all the other assets that previously belonged to the big G.

With so many tech sites talking about Google and stealing Microsoft's Windows 10 karma, someone at the Redmond-based giant decided to mock the search company by creating a website pocking fun at the official Alphabet page.

If you missed the news, Google used a domain called ABC.XYZ to tell the world about its Alphabet holding company name, so either Microsoft or a company employee thought it would be funny to register a domain named ABC.WTF and redirect all users to Bing.

And nope, it doesn't stop here. ABC.FAIL was also registered, again getting users to Bing.

As SEL writes, the domain registration details are all private, but the IP address apparently belongs to Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington.

“We're not involved”

In a statement submitted by the company itself, Microsoft says it wasn't involved in what seems to be an attempt to mock rival Google, but denied to mention why exactly its IPs are showing up in the domain logs.

“Microsoft did not buy this domain and is not involved in the redirect to bing.com,” the company said.

Right now, it's not yet known if other websites have also been registered in order to mock Google's new Alphabet company, but many people aren't quite surprised, given the fact that this wouldn't be Redmond's first such attempt.

In late 2013, Microsoft launched a campaign and a website called Scroogled, mocking Google's name and trying to bring to light some of the unfair practices that the search company was using to display ads to users and monetize them. The Scroogled campaign has since been discontinued when the new CEO Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer at the helm of Microsoft.