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To: Bearded One who wrote (18686)	4/21/1998 2:45:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Respond to of 24154

I don't remember anyone posting this one: Microsoft's stupid PR tricks msnbc.com Participants in the Canopus forum on CompuServe noticed that the pro-Microsoft postings of a person calling himself "Steve Barkto" sounded remarkably like those of a Microsoft executive named Rick Segal who had been active in the forum. Barkto said he lived in Oklahoma City and was a disgruntled IBM customer. ... Then a Canopus system administrator noticed that "Barkto" was actually logging in from a node close to Redmond, Wash., home of Microsoft. Will Zachmann, who runs the forum, investigated and found that the Barkto account was being billed to a Microsoft corporate credit card belonging to Segal. Zachmann asked Microsoft for an explanation and the company said it had opened an internal investigation into the matter. ... Barr told me that last month he spoke to Segal and asked him again about being Barkto. "All he said was, 'When does the statute of limitations run out?' And another one... Another famous "Microsoft as evil empire" incident happened several years ago involving the earlier mentioned Will Zachmann. At the time Zachmann was pulling down $130,000 per year, as a columnist for PC Week and other Ziff-Davis trade publications. Zachmann's columns were often critical of Microsoft. "It was no secret Microsoft wasn't pleased with my opinions," Zachmann told me. A "knockdown, drag-out" meeting was held wherein Zachmann's editors began to strong-arm him, suggesting that he write more favorably about Microsoft, he said. Zachmann says what particularly disturbed him about the incident was that within hours of that meeting, a Microsoft spokesman was on the phone "saying something like, 'I hear that you're going to be taking a somewhat more positive view of Microsoft. What can we do to help you?' " It was obvious, Zachmann says, that after the meeting one of his editors phoned Microsoft to tell them he had been swayed. Zachmann's response: He quit.