I come here with mixed feelings, which based on my experience, isn't the best place to start writing. However, one of Microsoft's public relations agencies, Edelman, has received negative coverage for distributing high-end notebook computers to journalists so these scribes can test drive Vista. The fact that some of these journalists ... oh, let's just call them opinion-makers ... are bloggers is not inconsequential as these are some of the folks that are shocked that Microsoft might be trying to influence them.
Okay, let's get a few things straight here:
If I were the Public Relations guy in charge of managing a Vista evaluation program, I would want to be absolutely dead certain there would be no hardware issues whatsoever. Period. Exclamation mark. I give credit to someone for deciding it was worth the investment to drop Ferrari (literally) notebooks onto reviewers with Vista pre-installed. The computers I work on would never, ever have the horsepower to run Vista and I believe many journalists (and many more bloggers) are my peers on this issue.
I have shipped tons and tons of hardware in my day to journalists for review. I ran a review program for two HP product lines, the Pavillion and HP PC Servers, as well as review programs for IBM's initial release of PS/2, Digital's reborn PC program and many stops in between. To get reviews, product must be shipped out for review. If it's software, then the Public Relations guy, as stated above, had better make for dead certain that sufficient hardware is present -- and including the hardware is fair game.
Now, about the same time, it was discovered that Edelman had been creating pro-Walmart "employee" blogs and offering payments to people to improve its entry in Jimmy Wales Wikipedia.
Regarding the first issue of Edelman creating the pro-Walmart "employee" blogs, this really doesn't come as a surprise for me as I am old enough to have been around in 2001 when Edelman was discovered to have been sending out letters of support on behalf of Microsoft over the signatures of dead citizens. For the record, Edelman is based in Chicago so one might even have some sort of preconceived notion that its "politics" might be aggressive. --And, this is the etymology of the use of the word "astroturfing" as an expression for a phony grassroots program.
Hence, I'm mixed. Edelman definitively deserves a time-out for some of its behavior. Other behavior is standard operating procedure. In an odd sort of way, I give Edelman credit for exploring the boundaries, but, clearly, some of their behavior is beyond the pale. And, worse still, is making the same mistake twice, once with Microsoft and once with Walmart. --That's not only wrong but it's also dumb.
