Day: February 5, 2007
Microsoft’s PR Ploys Don’t Play at Pensito Review
Not for sale: It has come to my attention that recently Microsoft Corp. sent Acer Ferrari laptop computers to about 90 bloggers to assist them in reviewing Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. As a result, some columnists criticized said bloggers for accepting a $2,200 gift from a company whose product they were then supposed to objectively review for the supposed benefit of consumers.
Let me just set the record straight — we here at Pensito Review did not receive Acer Ferrari computers from Microsoft. At least I know I didn’t. And I’m pretty sure that my fellow editors didn’t either. Jon would have bragged if he had received one, and Trish would have broken it within 48 hours and would have told us that via e-mail from her favorite North Florida library branch.
We simply refuse to be stoogie tools of Bill Gates.
But the fact that we did not receive Acer Ferrari computers from Microsoft is beside the point — it’s our ethical standards that count, unlike those unscrupulous bloggers who kept their Acer Ferrari computers. Would we have sent our newly received Acer Ferrari computer back to the Microsoft public relations flack who sent it to us? You bet!
See, the only way that we here at Pensito Review can remain astride our high horses is to be living emblems of ethicality. The only way we can continue to muckrake is by staying above the muck or moral compromise. The only way we can, with clear consciences, lambaste wingnuts and Repugs with impunity is to be better than they are, which, though relatively easy, does require some effort. We have our standards, and by golly, we’re sticking to them, no matter how many Acer Ferrari computers Microsoft throws at us.
You know, this is not the first instance where Microsoft has tried to influence public opinion through a shameless public relations ploy.
In 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported that Microsoft, during its antitrust trials, hired PR companies to flood newspapers with fake letters of support, bearing ordinary individuals’ names but actually written by Microsoft PR staff.
Pensito Review did not run those fake letters, and not just because it didn’t exist in 1998. If it had existed, we still would not have run fake-o PR letters.
Later, during the antitrust trials, Microsoft attempted to prove the inseparability of Windows and Internet Explorer by playing a video for the judge. But the government’s lawyer noticed that as the tape rolled on, the number of icons on the desktop kept changing. Microsoft had spliced together footage from different computers to make its point.
We would have been too savvy for that one, too. Especially Jon, who lives in Los Angeles and thus is close to the motion picture industry.
Then in 2002, Microsoft’s Web site featured a testimonial called “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert,” a first-person account by an attractive brunette “freelance writer” about how she had fallen in love with Windows XP.
Unfortunately, a Slashdot member discovered that the identical photo was available for rent from the stock-photo libraries of GettyImages.com. Sure enough: Microsoft had hired a PR firm to write the testimonial. The “switcher” did not actually exist.
That one would never have made it past our crack fact-checking team here at Pensito Review. Besides, anyone who has ever used a Macintosh computer would be utterly incapable of “falling in love” with Windows XP.
So the point that those “stunts” were pulled by Mircosoft before Pensito Review existed is moot. The real point is, our unassailable ethical standards would have protected us — like some kind of magical shield in a movie full of elves and orcs — from the evil minions of Microsoft.
I’m sure that Microsoft has not learned the error of its ways and the next time it introduces a new operating system it might send us a laptop computer to review that operating system. But we won’t take the bait from a company trying to exploit the lax ethical standards of the so-called blogosphere. We refuse to be stoogie tools of Bill Gates.
Nope. That puppy is going to be headed back to Redmond, Wash., just as quick as United Parcel Service can take it. Of course, it might not be fully functional. Right, Trish?
Quote du Jour
The enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index, prevail in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially among the hereditary leisure class.
— Thorsten Veblen (1887-1929), American social scientist
What If Vice Pres. Gore Had Outed a Covert CIA Specialist in Terror Weapons?
Imagine the reaction from the media and the Republican Party if this story had been in the news ten years ago:
Looks like Cheney will get away with jeopardizing our national security without punsihment, or even a mild rebuke.
Sworn testimony has revealed that Vice Pres. Al Gore masterminded the unmasking of a covert CIA agent who specialized in the terrorist blackmarket for weapons of mass destruction — and that Gore’s motive was to exact political retribution against the agent’s husband, an outspoken critic of Clinton-Gore policies.
It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that Vice Pres. Gore would have been hounded from office within weeks of such headlines — as Vice Pres. Mondale or any other Democratic vice president would have been.
And yet we now know from testimony by an FBI agent and others at Scooter Libby’s perjury trial in the CIA Leak scandal that it was not Karl Rove who masterminded the campaign to reveal agent Valerie Plame’s identity, as most of us assumed — it was Libby’s boss, Dick Cheney, the vice president of the United States.
It also clear from the evidence that Cheney was fully aware that Plame worked undercover for the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division, where she was involved hands-on in tracking of illegal sales and shipments of WMD around the world. It is also clear that Cheney was more than willing to risk whatever intelligence assets Plame had developed in order to retaliate against her husband, former Amb. Joe Wilson, who had dared to call the Cheney-Bush administration on its lies about Iraq’s purported nuclear capabilities.
If Cheney were a Democrat, and these accusations had been made against him as part of sworn testimony, the reaction in Washington would be as clamorous as it would be swift:
- Investigations would be launched by both the Senate and House committees on national security and government affairs.
- Even in advance of the hearings, the House would have drawn up Bills of Impeachment against the vice president and probably the president as well.
- Fox News would be leading with the story wall-to-wall, couching the news as a deliberate, pro-terrorist security breach orchestrated from the White House.
- Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts would be hammering away at the vice president, calling his patriotism into question and implying that he was revealing national secrets at the behest of his boss, the president.
Instead, what we have gotten from the media and the Congress is bascially, “So what? It’s just Cheney being Cheney.” It is apparent that the vice president will get away with jeopardizing our national security without punsihment, or even a mild rebuke.
