Doodle

War of the Halloween Videos: Google Goes for Cute, Microsoft Bets on Horror

Frederic Lardinois

31 Oct 2011 — 1 min read

I guess there are three ways to approach Halloween: you can go for cute, scary or sexy. Every year, both Google and Microsoft like to produce something Halloween-themed and this year is no exception. As in so many other areas of their competing businesses, the difference between their attempts to bring some Halloween fun to the Internet couldn’t be more different: Google produced a family-friendly video-doodle of its employees carving pumpkins and Microsoft went all out to produce a short horror video featuring a deranged Killer and the popular Kinect controller.

Google’s Pumpkins

Here is Google’s pumpkin video:

(Bonus: here is the behind-the-scenes story of how the video was created)

The Kinect of Horror

When you think of Microsoft, horror and video, chances are you are thinking about the infamous Songsmith video, but its Channel 9 team actually made good use of the company’s in-house video-production facilities and put together a respectable little horror video(YouTube version via WinRumors):

Bonus: One More Microsoft Video to Give You Nightmares

If that didn’t scare you, here’s the old Microsoft Songsmith video (which is almost guaranteed to give you nightmares tonight):

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls