Scroogled followup: Pawn Stars and Chromebook

microsoft-google-chromebook-scroogled-gmail-pawn-starsRemember the Scroogled campaign in which Microsoft ridicules Google’s way of showing ads on Gmail content?
Well, there’s a new episode in that saga (or drama). You’d though we were past this finally, but no, apparently Microsoft can’t get enough of it yet.
 
There’s a Pawn Stars inspired Scroogled video over at Bing video which shows the following:

Well ain’t that great. A woman holding a Chromebook takes it into the Gold & Silver pawn shop. Rick Harrison, one of the Pawn Stars stars, asks why the woman thinks it’s worth a ticket to Hollywood. Rick calls it a brick in a behind the scenes scene after that. He then goes on that it’s not a real laptop, as real ones have Office and iTunes that work offline.
I guess it’s time someone woke Microsoft up and told them this Scroogled campaign isn’t doing themselves a favor. First there was the Gmail man, then there was a Scroogled website. It’s all becoming pretty childish and lame – it was like that already from the beginning.
A quote from a post on Marketingland about this:

Again, there haven’t been a lot of horror stories about Chromebook phoning home about everything you do. Certainly the Chrome browser will fetch ahead for certain types of content; I’m fairly sure that Internet Explorer does the same.
If we’re talking ads, Windows 8 has new giant “Hero Ads” that show up baked into the operating system, an extension of other ad options in Windows 8 that people can buy. You can’t buy ads baked into Chromebooks. You just get them the old-fashioned way — in your browser.

At least Google sold a Chromebook to Microsoft for this Scroogled video, that’s a win.
Talking about sales, here’s how the Chromebook has been doing, for instance for Acer:

By January 2013, Acer’s Chromebook sales were being driven by “heavy Internet users with educational institutions”, and the platform represented 5-10 percent of the company’s U.S. shipments, according to Acer president Jim Wong. He called those numbers sustainable, contrasting them with low Windows 8 sales which he blamed for a slump in the market. Wong said that the company would consider marketing Chromebooks to other developed countries, as well as to corporations. He noted that although Chrome OS is free to license for hardware vendors, it has required greater marketing expenditure than Windows, offsetting the licensing savings.[99]
Over the summer of 2013 sales of Chromebooks increased to 3.3% of the market, while sales of Windows and Apple laptops declined. Between June 30 to September 7, 2013 computer sales in general were down with chromebooks the only category that were increasing, with 175,000 units sold.

So wait, in a market plagued by tablet and smartphone sales, Chromebooks were the only type of laptops increasing sales? Hmm, they must be bad indeed. Or is Microsoft just Miscroogsofting us? That sales info came from the Chromebook Wikipedia page.
See the Scroogled – Pawn Stars video here, titled ‘Want laptop value? Know what to look for.’
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