Between late 2012 and 2013, Microsoft — with Bill Gates as chairman — ran 'Scroogled,' a sustained negative-advertising campaign attacking rival Google. Devised by political strategist Mark Penn, the campaign accused Google of scanning Gmail users' messages to target ads and of skewing shopping results toward paying advertisers, and urged consumers to switch to Microsoft's Bing and Outlook.com. Microsoft even sold anti-Google 'Scroogled' merchandise. Critics, and some inside the tech industry, derided the effort as a cynical, fear-based attack rather than competition on product quality, and Microsoft wound the campaign down after about a year. It stood out as an unusually combative corporate-rival tactic from the company Gates built.