Microsoft Taps ‘Pawn Stars’ to Scroogle Over Google Chromebooks

Every day, Google executives must feel like they are being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past in the form of Ebeneezer Scroogle, Microsoft’s full blitz attack campaign against Google products. In the latest Scroogled edition, Microsoft takes shots at the Google Chromebook by putting it up for inspection in front of the famous Pawn Stars show: an addictive reality television series based in Las Vegas where people pawn their goods for cash.

At Gold & Silver Pawn Shop it’s all about separating the real deal from the imitation and, according to Microsoft, the “Google Chromebook sticks out like a sore thumb.” So how did Rick and his Pawn Star crew feel about the new Chromebook that was brought into the store?

The pawn shop owners laughed and told the woman who brought the Chromebook that it wasn’t a “real” laptop. “When you’re not connected, it’s pretty much a brick,” they said. This is because when you go offline with Chrome OS, you are denied access to many Chrome apps. The shop owners added that Google stores all Chromebook users’ information in the cloud so it can better target them with ads.

The main pawn broker noted:

Chromebook can’t install Office and that’s where the problems begin. Many of your documents (like Word, Excel and PowerPoint) will often appear with wacky formatting because Chromebook uses cheap imitations of Office. So the user gets poor substitutes for the real thing. Which describes Chromebook in a nutshell.”

While the bit is very well done, you begin to realize you’re watching a paid Microsoft advertisement when the boys start selling you Office products too. While you’d expect Microsoft to tout Office software, I’m not sure people who buy Chromebooks are really looking to run Microsoft apps anyway.

Regardless of the humor, Microsoft should be wary of all the bad karma likely to come back to bite it because of its Scroogled campaign. See, Google has the resources to make a 24-hour highlight reel, if they care to, about the disastrous state of Windows 8 and Internet Explorer along with Microsoft’s host of failing flagship products. But then again, only losers and crooked politicians stoop to such desperate attack strategies.

Whose technology is really Scroogling you over worse: that of Google or Microsoft?

Daniel Zeevi

By Daniel Zeevi

Daniel is a social network architect, web developer, infographic designer, writer, speaker and founder of DashBurst. Full-time futurist and part-time content curator, always on the hunt for disruptive new technology, creative art and web humor.