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Microsoft Caught Rigging ZD Net Poll

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-thats-funny-stuff dept.

Dj writes "Microsoft have been found to be rigging a ZDNet poll". Apparently they didn't dig on the idea of .NET losing. Of course as anyone knows, never trust an online poll because this sort of stuff is obviosly happening all the time. I just wonder how many comments posted around the net are posted with the same goals in mind.

4 of 768 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmmm. no suprise here by el_doop · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, it sorta was...

    Several of the voters evidently followed a link contained in an email, the subject line of which ran: "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR .NET!" We know this, because our logs include the Web address where visitors browsed from; when people click there from a Microsoft Exchange email message, Exchange helpfully gives us the subject line and username. The people who followed that link all had email addresses in the microsoft.com domain.

  2. Re:Did Microsoft bother... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is nothing new.

    Our company has 40k employees and whenever there is a big poll somewhere involving any of our products, a memo is sent out to the entire company telling everyone to go vote for our products.

    Needless to say, even a portion of that 40,000 can drastically change the skew of a poll.

    I always vote for a competitor because I find it detestible that my employer would do this.

  3. There is a note about this by xanadu-xtroot.com · · Score: 3, Informative

    On the poll archive page, there is this message at the top:

    Poll Results
    On 21 December, ZDNet posted a story reporting the preliminary results of this poll, which showed a large majority of respondents who said they planned to deliver applications via Web services by the end of 2002 favoured Java for the job. At the time, Java outranked .Net by a factor of three in this poll. By early January, the position had reversed; the results are shown here. An investigation indicated that Microsoft employees used vote-rigging to distort the results. The full story can be found here.

    --
    I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
    I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
  4. Re:So why didn't ZDnet pull the poll? by bungalow · · Score: 4, Informative
    It appears that the article has been edited since you linked to it.

    The new test reads thus:


    On 21 December, ZDNet posted a story reporting the preliminary results of this poll, which showed a large majority of respondents who said they planned to deliver applications via Web services by the end of 2002 favoured Java for the job. At the time, Java outranked .Net by a factor of three in this poll. By early January, the position had reversed; the results are shown here. An investigation indicated that Microsoft employees used vote-rigging to distort the results. The full story can be found here.