Microsoft -- like Novell [1, 2, 3, 4] -- uses YouTube to promote its products and to spin/lie (e.g. about OOXML), but according to the following two reports, Microsoft also uses YouTube to disparage its competition. Microsoft not only sues Google and resorts to whisper campaigns; right now it has employees going out there to smear a rival of Microsoft's biggest cash cow (and one of the very few products that are profitable):

The Irony of Microsoft's Anti-Google Apps Campaign on YouTube

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In a Microsoft video extolling its virtues, the narrator makes the point that marketing is difficult with Google Apps. It's far simpler with Microsoft Office.

So we find it deliciously ironic that Microsoft is marketing a number of anti-Google Apps videos using Google's YouTube. Hmm...doesn't that defeat the point a bit?

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It all feels like a company protecting its power base more so than embracing the current disruption in the market.

Microsoft Attacks Google Apps ... on YouTube

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They'll let anything onto YouTube these days. No, I'm not talking about the millionth video featuring a squirrel lip-syncing to Right Said Fred, but a set of Microsoft-created videos attacking Google Apps. I guess Google, which owns YouTube, really has no inclination to censor anything aside from content that violates copyrights; but watching the Microsoft videos play out next to that YouTube logo is like watching promos for a TV show like "Dexter" (produced by Showtime) playing on HBO or another rival channel.

Microsoft sometimes uses former employees from the Office group in order to do the smearing/belittling of Google Apps and the Microsoft-paid blog called TechFlash is now giving a platform for a former Microsoft employee ("He worked in Microsoft's Information Technology Group in the early 1990s," says the bottom part) to do the same type of things. This control of the press is a subject that was demonstrated in the previous post and one which we'll return to later.

It's easy to see why Microsoft is so concerned. First it was ODF and now it's Google Apps. One dismantles Microsoft's lock-in using open formats that everyone supports and the other challenges Microsoft's core business model. Microsoft's old friend, Dina Bass from Seattle, has just disseminated this Microsoft narrative which she originally published in Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. President Stephen Elop is preparing for the biggest shakeup to the $19 billion Office business in a decade as the company races Google Inc. to sell Internet-based programs.