Over the past little while we have been seeing some really different advertising coming out of the Monster at Redmond. Sure a lot of people didn’t like the Seinfeld and Bill ads (I thought they were marginally funny) and some thought the Laptop Hunter adds were a good departure for the company. Meanwhile the reaction to the recent Internet Explorer ads was again mixed with some thinking they were hilarious (myself included) and others thinking they were just stupid.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which sides the typical Microsoft vs. Apple people teamed up with but the series of ads they are doing for Office 2010 carry on the warped and funny aspect of all their recent product advertisements. Like where else would you find the hero crying to the sky at the headstone for Clippy or see full scale action special effects usually found in actions movies.

I only hope that they continue this funky ad campaign style when it comes to Windows 7 hitting the market.

Where is the Microsoft marketing team getting their great drugs? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Here we go again.

Once more some-one in need of a weekend post to make it to Techmeme latches on to the fact that GMail has added ‘offline’ capabilities to its web email client and how that is going to be the death of Microsoft’s Outlook. It never fails that the moment Google does something that others have been for sometime before them it is the beginning of the end for some Microsoft product. In this case Zoho’s email client, Yahoo’s Zimbra and Hotmail through Windows Live Mail have had this kind of ‘offline’ ability for some time but it isn’t either one of those apps that GMail is going to kill. No, it’s one of the most widely used e-mail / calendaring / Task Management client both in and out of the corporate world that GMail is going to bring to its knees and then bury.

Ya … okay whatever you say bud. Think you could share those drugs you must be on?

This isn’t to say that GMail won’t solidify its position as the MacBook Pro Web 2.0 love everything Apple hate every Microsoft crowd with the addition of this ‘offline’ mode. This isn’t to say that GMail won’t continue to gain users because it will but to suggest that Outlook is now going the way of the Dodo bird is the height of ridiculousness.

The author of this Techmeme bait post Farhad Manjoo goes on to add

Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it’s a good time to assess the state of desktop software. There are some things that work better on your computer (your music app, your photo editor, your spreadsheets), and there are some that work better online (everything else).

Well if this past week is any indicate what with Magnolia having to go offline because they lost all the user data or Google having a hiccup and labelling every site on the as malware my conviction that some things at this point in time belong more on the desktop than the web. Chief among these applications is the very lifeblood of our online lives – the email client. The idea that I could be responsible if I should ever lose my data for some reason would pale in comparison to the reaction I would have if say for some reason Google lost my data either by a freak hardware failure of a deliberate deletion ala Facebook or Flickr.

It is one thing to place your trust in something within your own control; such as your email but another to do the same thing with a web service that has no liability because the service is free. this is what corporate environments look at when it comes to the valuable electronic data that it generates everyday. So unless things change a lot in this regard we will probably see more of these delusional types of claims but in the end – sorry but GMail will never kill off Outlook or any desktop application.

GMail under investigation for killing … Outlook is a post from: The Inquisitr

Email services company Xobni has raised $7 million Series B in a round lead by Cisco that included existing investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Atomico.

Xobni offers an Outlook plugin that brings 2.0 services to the inbox. The company has access rights/ deals in place with LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Skype and Hoovers.

Xobni said in a statement that it would use the new round to “keep pushing our innovation on uncovering and leveraging all the amazing information and relationships locked up in our overloaded inboxes, particularly in Microsoft Outlook, the most utilized inbox in the world.”

Xobni has been downloaded 1.5 million times, and the company is currently running trials with Fortune 500 companies.

More details on Xobni at QBase.

Xobni Takes $7 million, Cisco Leads the Round is a post from: The Inquisitr

Zimbra’s main selling points are its abilities to manage conversation-based threads as well as to incorporate tags into e-mail, to allow for advanced search capabilities, and to allow for the incorporation of so-called “Zimlets” — or third-party applications — into the e-mail client. As such, it’s been described as a Gmail-meets-Outlook type of solution, or a setup similar to an Outlook-plus-Xobni configuration. Its creators recognize the comparisons but say their program does bring something new to the table.

Client Comparisons

Like Outlook or Thunderbird, Zimbra aggregates mail from different services into one centralized, client-based platform. All three have IMAP capabilities. While Outlook is limited to Windows-based systems, Zimbra — like Thunderbird — is open source and available on Mac or Linux platforms as well.

The bigger benefit, its creators say, lies more in Zimbra’s ability to bring traditionally server-based options — the ones you see in Gmail — to a locally-based application.

“Until now, [things such as] search indexing have been a property of a mail server,” Zimbra co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj told The Inquisitr. “We wanted to just bring that in.”

With both search indexing and conversation-based threads, Zimbra’s programmers see the common ground with Gmail. They point out, however, that their platform delivers the options online or off — and without you having to be logged into a web-based system.

“[It's] exactly like Gmail,” Dharmaraj explained. “Whatever Gmail’s doing on the server side, now we’re doing it from a desktop angle. You can collapse threads, delete an entire thread, tag an entire thread, or file an entire thread to a folder.”

Talking Xobni

So what about Xobni, the Outlook add-on that offers some of those same functions? The folks behind Zimbra are aware of the overlap but say it is not absolute.

“You can use Xobni on top of Outlook and get some of those things,” Dharmaraj told The Inquisitr. “But [it] does not bring the notion of conversations, does not bring the notion of Zimlets. You can’t delete an entire conversation that dealt with [a] subject, because that becomes a server-side operation,” he said.

The Yahoo Factor

There’s no question Yahoo’s influence and its competition with Google have played a part in Zimbra’s development since the acquisition. The Zimbra team, in fact, has spent the last year helping Yahoo play catch up with advanced e-mail functionality and deployment.

“Yahoo was nowhere in the scene — [it was] basically Google, Zimbra, and Microsoft. When Yahoo bought us, they bought an entry into mailboxes that are hosted by ISPs, by EDUs for students. We definitely brought them into those markets,” Dharmaraj noted.

Future Focus

Zimbra’s focus now is on finding ways to bring its features into the Yahoo Mail brand and begin expanding its capabilities.

“Search, Zimlets, conversation, and tags — everybody liked Zimbra because it helped in productivity because of those four things. What we’re doing is bringing those four things to non-Zimbra backing,” Dharmaraj said.

Projects in the works include an eventual full integration of Zimbra into Yahoo Mail, plus expanded options for synchronization — and what Zimbra hopes will be an online first.

“Later on this year, we’re bringing the Zimbra Calendar to Yahoo Calendar, so consumers will get probably the first CalDAV-enabled, iCal-enabled calendar client that’s out there,” Dharmaraj revealed.

“Hopefully — if Google doesn’t launch before that,” he added.

Zimbra Desktop: A Closer Look at Yahoo’s New E-mail Offering is a post from: The Inquisitr

The company has released the beta version of Zimbra Desktop, an offline mail client marketed specifically to users of Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Gmail. The utility offers POP and IMAP access as well as offline access to the iCal calendar function.

The program includes a list of other features, such as offline access to the Zimbra Documents and Zimbra Briefcase programs. None of them, however, appear to offer anything significantly different from or better than what users could find on Gmail or any other popular third-party mail client. Here are the primary selling points:

• “All your accounts in one place.”
  Yeah… Gmail’s been offering that option for ages. So does Outlook, Thunderbird, and basically every other desktop mail utility.
• “Better for big inboxes.”
  Maybe a slight advantage over Outlook, though not Gmail. Still, not enough to warrant a switch, at least for me.
• “Be more productive.”
  The statement here is that Zimbra Desktop can manage contacts, calendar appointments, documents, and tasks. See previous statement about Gmail, Outlook, etc.

This is a strange one. It’s clear what Yahoo is attempting to do with the Zimbra Desktop program — but at this point, I’m not sure why anyone would bother switching from their current e-mail system. It’s a decent enough program, sure, but why would I bother migrating over? It strikes me as someone saying, “Hey…want a program incredibly similar to what you’re currently using? It does most things about as well.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not seeing the value.

Yahoo Tries to Outdo Outlook with Zimbra is a post from: The Inquisitr