Today rumours are cooking all over the place that Microsoft is in talks — and has a $500 million dollar offer on the table — for buying Claria, the company once well known for the hard-to-get-rid-of abomination known as Gator. They have been trying to shake the ravenous Gator monkey for a long time, meanwhile they are well known today for being a common Adware vendor.

Claria still suffers some degree of controversy and scandal because it deals in what is known as adware. It’s not quite as insidious as spyware, but some argue that it’s close. Adware has the rather unappealing reputation of luring consumers to download programs that deliver advertising — and sometimes the folks don’t realize that they have downloaded a program that tracks their online behavior for the purposes of serving up such ads.

If any of these reports are actually true (and where there’s this smoke there is usually fire), then here’s my immediate reaction: Microsoft, what the hell are you thinking? Go buy something that doesn’t have skeletons in the closet and baggage in the foyer. Buy some promising upstarts like Yahoo and Google have been doing. Spend the money on folks building cool stuff. Maybe Claria does have some upside for another company that doesn’t already have its own share of PR problems, but Microsoft? Yowsa, this will make users even more skittish of the software giant. I bet Apple is hoping this happens.

Nik Cubrilovic thinks “everybody benefits:”

Common sense tells you that the valuation price is not so that Microsoft learns more about how spyware works. What they are after is Gain, which is a Claria product. The reason why? Gain is the most advanced targeted advertising system on earth.

Hmm, sorry Nik, I don’t think the bad PR and fractured consumer confidence that is sure to follow would be worth the benefit of GAIN or the alleged 12 terabytes of Claria data they’ve collected from “willing” surfers behavior.

What do other bloggers think?
Eirikso.com: “I need my media center! But somwhere I draw the line. Apple, where are you? ”
Ed Bott thinks it would be a P.R. disaster: “The only way it makes sense is if Microsoft buys the company, fires everyone involved with it, has their buildings exorcised, and rewrites every line of code in their product.”
Niall Kennedy: “I think MSN could accomplish similar tracking behavior as an option in MSN Messenger or a toolbar before poisoning their evil empire image with Claria.”

tags: Claria, Microsoft

Did this post make you go hmm?

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