The following events took place over the last year and a half: Microsoft made a bid to buy out Yahoo!  But Yahoo! turned it down and signed a deal with Google instead.  The advertising industry and the government disapproved of the Yahoo! and Google deal.

Recently Google announced that they are developing a new operating system called Chrome OS.  And then Microsoft said that the new version of Office will have major cloud support.  Late last month, Microsoft and Yahoo! signed a search deal that would give Yahoo! additional revenue and Microsoft the exclusive rights to power Yahoo!’s search engine with their own.

Clearly Google is not happy with this deal.  This is why the Mountain View based search engine company decided to step up their marketing efforts against Microsoft Office.  Google’s campaign is called Going Google.

Google will be releasing several advertisements about why around 3,000 organizations that are signing up for Google Apps every day.  On the billboards, there will be a new message about Google Apps shown every day for a month.

The billboard ads will be placed on four major U.S. highways.  Those highways are the 101 in Northern California, the West Side Highway in New York, the Mass Pike in Boston, and Ike in Chicago.

Google is also encouraging users on Google Apps to tweet their stories about using the service with the #gonegoogle hashtag.

[via TechCrunch]

“Melissa” was the first virus that spread through e-mail.  It was created by David Smith who was 31 in 1999 when he built it.  The virus turned 10 years old today and it caused about $80 million in damages and infected one million PCs.

The subject line of the virus was “Here is that document you asked for … don’t show anyone else;-)” and it contained an infected file called LIST.doc.  The document contained passwords to 80 pornographic websites.  The virus spread through Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2003, Outlook 97, and Outlook 98.

There were about four variations of the virus.  Smith was sentenced 20 months in prison and was charged $5,000.  Smith was also told to stay clear of computer networks and the Internet without court authorization.

[via TGDaily]