Microsoft's "stealth" PR blitz blows up in its face salonmagazine.com
That was the title from the news.com link, the title on the page is For Microsoft's PR machine, "innovate or die" becomes "innovate or buy." Another one of those things everybody would agree with in a different context, the buy part has been quite popular of late, but it's not clear how it will work on the hearts and minds front.
Maybe such an approach serves public convenience, as Microsoft maintains; maybe it inhibits the competitive marketplace, as the antitrust lawyers argue. But who in his right mind would call this "integration" an innovation? Inventing a Web browser is innovative; shoving its code into an operating system -- even elegantly weaving its code into an operating system -- is hardly a creative act of the same order.
IE, so modular it's integrated! Or vice versa. Call it what you want, but once again, I'd say the old line CS view would be that arbitrarily entangling application and OS code like that is just bad software design. Anyway, these Salon guys are obviously of the ilk at some level or other, they even picked up on the Firefly acquisition and went back to that NYT Magazine article. Or maybe they just lurk around here :-). Politely, they ignored the "we could do it in a week" part.
When the New York Times Magazine profiled the company last year, one of its founders, Max Metral, described how small, innovative software companies think about Microsoft: "All we can do is meet with them and try to see what they're going to do to us when they feel like doing it."
On to the "innovative" PR strategy:
Is this an innovation in the creative purchasing of good publicity, or just an old idea from the corporate PR arsenal? The concept of "Astroturf" lobbying -- political pressure campaigns that appear to be organized at the grass-roots level but are really paid for out of industry coffers -- is nothing new. In any case, the plan (which targets those states where state-level antitrust actions are moving forward) is just a proposal rather than a settled course of action, according to Microsoft spokespeople. Maybe so; but even by floating such an idea, Microsoft has screwed up: From now on, even the spontaneous positive coverage it receives may look a little suspect.
That's the part I find a little odd about the current finger wagging. The heavy hand of Microsoft PR always seemed fairly obvious to me, there may be a difference in degree here, but it doesn't seem all that new. Plenty of Microsoft's press looked a little suspect all along. Of course, on the hearts and minds front, the more people that realize this the better. To repeat as usual, everybody should understand Microsoft, not just the savvy investors who know the value of a good monopoly when they see one.
Why would a smart company do such a dumb thing? Usually Microsoft's gaffes are attributed to its legendary arrogance, but in this case there may be something else at work. In other Microsoft news last week, the company announced it would voluntarily alter a variety of content-distribution contracts that had become points of contention with the antitrust investigations. Meanwhile, the cover of the latest Business Week asks, "What to Do About Microsoft: Leave It Alone, Regulate It, or Break it Up?"
Marc Andreeson one week, What to do about Microsoft the next. Got to check it out, though they'll probably go for "leave it alone", it being the business press and everything.
One of Microsoft's current ad campaigns for its business software is built around the phrase "Digital Nervous System." More and more, Microsoft is looking like one nervous digital system itself.
Everybody knows they've been making me and a lot of other people nervous for a while, so that's only fair. All I can say is stay away from my DNA.
Cheers, Dan. |
