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Microsoft Promotions Turn Up in USPS Offices
Several readers, like this Anonymous Coward, have written with links to a letter from Cliff Crouch on macintouch.com. "I stumbled across this letter submitted to a web site I frequent. Apparently Microsoft has promotional displays with free WindowsXP promotional software in U.S. Post Offices."
Perhaps I'm missunderstanding, but M$ is giving Xp away for free?
Or are they giving software that runs on XP away for free?
Which one?
Heh, I wished they'd mail me a new Debian CD... I don't free like burning one... =)
Oh well, I can suffer 10 Minutes of torturous burning for a lifetime of joy. =)
Location: Mt. Xinu
usps.gov has a marketing deal with Microsoft apparently. Their Web-Based Solutions page, accessable from the main usps.gov page, is "Powered by Microsoft bCentral", and promotes subscriptions to Microsoft services.
Maybe we need to add "separation of corporation and state" to our "separation of church and state" in the constitution?
I really don't care if MS advertises in post offices. What piques my curiosity, though, is what were / are government agencies' policies on advertising?
:)? Could an advertsising policy cause bias in a government agency like campaign contributions cause in politics?
I know that the MA Registry now allows advertising at their sites (somthing for people to look at during the long waits). It wasn't that way too long ago. . .
I have never seen an advertisment in a post office that did not either promote USPS's services or was somthing about taxes.
Was this by design, or was it that no one thought of advertising in a post office before
It's not radical or life-changing, but it does have a large curiosity factor that I could not find much info on. . .
Would someone who's felt bold enough to walk off with all the free aol/earthlink/whatever cds in a store please post about the experiance?
You are 100% correct. My local post office has advertisements posted not just on a bulletin board, but in the office itself. And these aren't all small local companies. I've seen displays for John Hancock Insurance, Bank of Boston (when it used to be BOB), and even _gasp_ Sun Microsystems. (That one was a hiring blitz, they have a big facility nearby.) On top of that the Post office in Lowell sells phone cards from Sprint (or maybe they're AT&T), and even stationary, pens, pencils, binders, etc. The USPS doesen't generate revenue from stamps alone.
What annoys me about this story is that someone considers this news... Hey timothy, post something I don't know about. (If this were about any of the companies I just mentioned, do you think it would be considered important?)
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
like a bunch of startled dugongs, or are you going to burn a batch of Linux install CDs and swap them with the XP demo disks? Use one of those "we make it look as much like Windows as possible" distributions, and you might just get away with it, too.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
At the place that I work, we've been using (UGH!) AOL for corporate e-mail, cuz it's fairly easy to use, and they've got POPs everywhere.
Users manage to munge up thier software on a fairly regular basis. this isn't helped by the bloatware that aol calls a client.
In addition they're constantly losing the discs that we leave at the sites, so I go and grab a stack of 30 or so it seems about once every other month.
At the local Wawa (a Philadelphia area chain of conveinence stores) the GM won't let me take them.
At the CompUSA, they're just glad to be rid of the things.
When I couldn't find them at the OfficeMax, the clerk went into the back room, and gave me an entire sealed box of the discs. Of course, we do a lot of business with that office max, so I suppose YMMV.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
Hey, what's the big deal? Remember, Microsoft won. The Government offered "unconditional surrender."
;-)
Next up, Dubya is moving into the shed. The White House will become the new Microsoft Monument--once the bugs are ?!?(*)?@@?$%#?...
Doh. I thought I was on Slashdot, not the Register. What is this? Some random person on some random web site says he saw an ad in a random post office? This isn't news.
Free promotions, how strange... and kinda desparate sounding...
.net product release, which I can be privileged to attend at the cost of $149 (plus 12.5% GST).
.NET to start with, this slipped the gear lever into reverse for me.
:)
Down here in NZ I received a postcard 'invitation' to the visual studio
Now I may have a distorted view of the universe, from working on a Microsoft development platform for too long, but shouldn't MS be offering incentives for developers to take up their new dev tools ? Maybe a free copy of VS.NET here & there ? So we can develop applications that require our clients to purchase MS licenses ?
No, they can give away massive $$$ to promote the OS of the future, but developers should PAY THEM to sit in a big room and hear about new products that we could buy off them. Altho I was not rushing to take up
oh, and my home desktop is KDE, so even a free copy of XP ain't getting near my hardware
LesF
What part of "United States Post Office" don't you understand? That the civil servants are employed by the Federal Government?
There are many makers of software in this great country and I'm sure none of them apprecite their tax dollars being used to support Microsoft. Don't you remember half of them testifying against M$ over the last few years? Well, gee there it is being promoted in a maner that some people will take as offial US sponsorship. It stinks. Were any of them offered the same oppertunity? Would it even be possible to fit all the material there? 30 Linux distros, 45 BSDs, AOL, Sun, HP, Compaq. There would not be room to stand.
Let's look at another thing "powering" the US post office by way of compairison. Jeeps. You see them all over, as they won bids on an open market. The Post Office Jeeps were stripped of all insignia and were only recognizable by their form. No cardboard cut outs recomending the purchase of Jeeps ever kept the sun from shining through a USPO window. No "test drives" were ever offered. Instead, Jeep was happy to be making the sale and the use was recomendation enough. The USPO had no intentions of recomending one automobile maker over another.
Go to Netcraft, you will see that most US government sites do NOT run M$ trash.
So my wife asks me, "why would they bother to promote M$, a company that needs no promotion." Might the settlement be nationalization? Oh shit.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.