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."

Comments

not only that

[Syre]

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?

OK, here's the question. . .

[cgleba]

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?

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 :)? Could an advertsising policy cause bias in a government agency like campaign contributions cause in politics?

It's not radical or life-changing, but it does have a large curiosity factor that I could not find much info on. . .

What are you smoking?

[Erris]

The post office is not really part of the government but rather a business run to support an important country function.

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.