BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Google's Privacy Blowback Helps Microsoft Gain Mindshare

Following
This article is more than 10 years old.

Image via Wikipedia

Google has been facing increased scrutiny from Internet users around the world after it changed its privacy policies for its different services to a single unified privacy policy, which allows it to access user information across its services and it to personalize its services for them. This criticism follows complaints surrounding Google’s Search Plus Your World update, which personalized search results for every users in a bid to boost the usage of its Google Plus social service. Microsoft, Google’s rival, stands to gain the most from Google’s several privacy missteps, as it tries to highlight Google’s flaws and attract users to its own offerings like Bing, Hotmail and Office 365.

Check out our complete analysis of Microsoft

Microsoft Aims to Capitalize on Google’s Blunders

Hotmail, which is still the number one email service in terms of users, has seen its market share decline since Google launched Gmail. Bing still commands only a fraction of the global search engine market which is dominated by Google. Google is even chipping away at Microsoft’s dominant market share in office productivity software with Google Docs, while Microsoft tries to counter it with Office 365. Even on the internet browser front, Google Chrome has grabbed a significant amount of market share from Internet Explorer in the past couple of years.

In the meantime, Google’s attempts to compete with Facebook in the social networking space are having a negative impact on users of its core services like Google, Gmail, Google Docs etc., who don’t want their personal usage data to be used by Google to earn more advertising revenue. Microsoft is taking potshots at Google and inviting Google users to try out alternatives by Microsoft, promising better privacy controls and a choice to keep their personal data personal – away from the hands of advertisers. [1]

While it’s still a long shot, this may be the edge Microsoft has been searching for since the last couple of years, as its Online services division continues to lose billions of dollars.

Special Offer: Get 13 undervalued stocks from value expert John Buckingham in the Free Special Report 2012: Time For Value. Click here for instant access.

Online services like Bing, Hotmail and MSN account for less than 2% of Microsoft’s $32 Trefis price estimate, so we don’t expect it to have much of an impact on Microsoft’s stock price, which is currently 5% below our Trefis price estimte for Microsoft.

Understand How a Company’s Products Impact its Stock Price at Trefis

Notes:

  1. Gone Google? Got Concerns? We Have Alternatives, Microsoft Blog []

Like our charts? Embed them in your own posts using the Trefis WordPress Plugin.