Posted on Wednesday, October 10 2007 @ 3:52 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Microsoft's CEO gave Google another punch at the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Programme in the U.K.:
"Have we seen the migration of things even like email? . . . Our Windows Live Hotmail, in and of itself, doesn't generate much ad revenue. So we've had to put, essentially, a whole portal around it because the traffic around it is very valuable but it's not very easily monetized in the context of mail.
"Google's had the same experience, even though they read your mail and we don't," Ballmer said, to chuckles and and a couple of gasps in the audience. "That's just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It's not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out."
Ballmer isn't the first to fire salvos at Google's Gmail privacy policy. Privacy advocates have been critical over the policy almost since the beginning, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed nonetheless.
