Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft may Sanction the 'Switcher' PR-Rep
Nerull sent in a snippit from The Age saying "Microsoft may consider sanctions against a public relations consultant who tried to pass herself off as someone who had switched from the Apple Mac to Windows XP in a high-profile US advertising campaign, chief executive Steve Ballmer said today." Here is Monday's
Slashdot Story that this follows up to. Lots of amusing little quotes about
what it means to be trustworthy.
. . . oops! We got caught! Why, this was one rouge contractor who didn't meet our standards of conduct. We'll see that s/he is appropriately flogged in the public square. Then we'll go on doing the same things, only being more careful not to be so obvious about it.
From an organizational perspective, this renders down to if we screw up, you're the one left swinging.
At the best (or worst, depending on the angle you're looking from) she came up with the concept and it was okayed by her superiors -- it did end up on the Microsoft site, after all, and from the article she wrote, I seriously doubt she has the technical skills to hack in and put it there herself.
Microsoft's claim that they're the innocent victims of the manipulations of some ad agency schemer is so obviously ridiculous and transparent I can't believe they're even trying it.
It wasn't a outright lie. she had switched to XP, and wrote about it. She changed some of the less relevent details so that people didn't dismiss it as a piece of marketing fluff, but that was all.
The facts remain true. She did switch. She did find it easy.
Besides, this is marketing. It's not expected to be 100% true. How do we know that any of Apple's "switch" stories aren't simply made up?
Although not referring specifically to the Mallinson case, he added it may be necessary to "weed out" employees who did not live up to Microsoft's code of behaviour.
Microsoft has a code of behavior? You could have fooled me. Especially given the reprehensible way they have behaved as a corporation for the last decade.
Oh... wait... Maybe I'm making assumptions about what the code of behavior says. Maybe she will get in trouble for violating the code of behavior, namely, because she got caught and did not get away with it.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Let me get this straight, Microsoft hires her to do this little commercial, I imagine not giving much of a shit whether or not she switched. Perhaps she mentioned the word switch, so she seemed to be qualified. Then they will actually punish her for their retarded PR mistake? This is like a parent telling their kids, "Jonny, go tell our neighbors about our dog that we don't have." And then once the neighbors call up asking why Jonny is going on and on about a non-existant dog, the parents say, "JONNY! GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE, YOU LYING YOU LITTLE SOB, IMA GONNA SMACK YOU DOWN!" Punishing your workers for the very thing you hired them to do demonstrates piss poor decision making on the managers parts. MS is the one who came up with this rediculous faux-switch campaign, shooting the messenger who brought it to the people is just irresponsible. Personally, this sounds like a pink-slip relay, everyone handing the responsiblity down until it arrives at the foot of the person who listened to what everyone told them to do.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Blame the real culprit...the nefarious marketing hack Don Funk (donfu@microsoft.com). Here's an image from that ad. Note the name of the user who is logged on.
Valerie may have written the copy but do you think she got the stock image, drove to Microsoft, got on Don Funk's computer, took a screen shot, then uploaded it to the server? Perhaps she just made a "Don Funk" user on her machine and hacked into the MS web site.
Ah well, Ballmer's on the case - "I will certainly castigate the offender." Ooh, I never thought they'd go for castigation at MS...after all, that would leave them with eunuchs.
Micirosoft has been known for this type of behaviour. Using one of their own PR persons to pretend to be a 'switcher' (for the lack of a better term) is just par for the course
I'm not surprised MS is planning reprisals for this person. Pretending to be an ordinary joe off the street that switched is ok - getting caught as a stooge in one of MS's standard FUD strategies though - that's just not acceptable.
<sarcasm>
How dare she be so stupid as to not have gone into hiding and prevent the damage to MS's precious reputation?
</sarcasm>
Karma: Shagadelic (mostly affected by those tight knickers - yeah baby, yeah!)
I certainly agree with the general sentiment that Microsoft has egg on its face. Again. But, really, the faux-switcher website cannot be considered as a high profile ad campaign by any stretch of the imagination. Where are the TV ads and radio spots? The X-10 pop-up ads have had much more of an impact than the Microsoft webpage. Most of us learned about the MS ad here on /., not via any source of mainstream media.
Perhaps this wasn't Ballmer's idea - at least he's trying to present a claim of plausible deniability - not that it matters. MS is certainly responsible here - but blowing the fraud out of proportion isn't doing any good. It will simply allow MS to downplay criticism of their greater crimes with a "there they go again" excuse.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Maybe it's just me but I don't really care about the stock photos. Sure, there was an image of a woman on the site, but they didn't caption it saying it was her, they didn't imply in any way that the picture was her, it was just a picture of a woman and everyone jumped to the conclusion that it was supposed to be her.
At the end of the day, on that point, who cares? If the content of the page was correct (and the person was indeed true) then as far as I'm concerned they could have put any picture of any person from the Getty library.
Finally, I'd far rather see a picture of a pretty model than an ugly 40 year old woman - even if the former doesn't understand the concept of double clicking, let alone switching operating systems.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
If anyone inside Redmond is steamed, it would probably be because of the stock photo.
Sure, she probably was told to 'switch' to XP and write a story about it. But it's the fake picture that was the embarassment. If she used a real photo of herself, it would be dismissed as just another paid advertisement.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
From the article:
...you name it.
Although not referring specifically to the Mallinson case, [Ballmer] added it may be necessary to "weed out" employees who did not live up to Microsoft's code of behaviour.
Uhh. I'd love to know precisely what this so-called "code of behavior" is.
We would then be free, presumably, to hold it to Ballmer et al to these standards every time they lie, cheat and obfuscate the truth about their DRM motives, security holes they claim aren't really security holes, but "features"
I'm especially amused that Microsoft is trying to take some ethical high ground on this. Even if you accept that this incident wasn't planned, everything from Dr. DOS to the Halloween docs prove they've got no such mitre to fling around.
My
Limekiller
Hi Steve! (I know you're reading.)
What does Microsoft's code of behavior have to say about employee conduct that gets the company convicted in the Federal court system for multiple violations of the Sherman Act?
What does the code say about executives who lie under oath in videotaped depositions?
What does the code say about manufacturing evidence in a trial?
What does the code say about attempting to intimidate potentially hostile witnesses?
Will you be "weeding out" any of the Microsoft employees who are known to have done all of these things?
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
"In a perception sense this hasn't been a very good four to five months, I'll be blunt. On the other hand we now understand another important lesson in terms of what it means to be a trustworthy partner."
This disgusts me. First, what he seems to find bad is the perception of the public, not the reality of his company's malfeasance. He then claims to understand a really important lesson about being trustworthy. Apparently that lesson is that a trustworthy partner does not lie. Some would tend to a harsher interpretation - that the lesson was don't get caught lying. Whether true or not, I find the most generous interpretation to be sufficiently damning.
Pretty lame Mr. Balmer, pretty lame.
To: slashdot development crew
From: more readers than you realize
Re: expanded comment threshold settings
I sincerely propose that Slashdot implement a threshold setting so that readers could view comments in a more dynamic way. The proposal: let the reader chose the minimum and MAXIMUM settings for comments that they wish to see. For example, view all comments from +1 to +3.
The benefit I see in this is that while still eliminating the 'first posts' and goatse.cx posts that hover around 0 and -1, this will also spare readers the homogenous groupthink ('Microsoft sucks!') that is seen at the +5 posts.
Please take this post will all sincerity.
Thank you.
You're overlooking one thing here. From the outset, this was being compared to Apple's 'Switch' campaign in which they use real people (as far as we know ;-) )
So...in addition to this article being paid for, they didn't use the real person to whom the article was attributed, thus making it even *further* from Apple's campaign than was originally thought. That's why there's such an uproar about this being a 'stock' photo. It wouldn't be a big deal if it was, say, a webpage purely about product features or tech support.
Also...another point that I'd like to make, just because I sometimes enjoy kicking dead horses (it's therapeutic, you should try it), is that in All of Apple's 'Switch' campaign ads and their website ads, they never include instructions on how to switch. That's what makes the article even more fake. Yes, they have a page on how to do the switch, I know, but they don't say, "Hi, I'm some kewl dude who switched to the Mac, and here's exactly, click by click, how I did it" in any of the ads.
you know the origin of that word? tribes used to take a goat, assign to it all the sin and blame of all the tribe's members and then tie it to a stake and kill it.
the relevance? obviously this ad stunt was done with approval, at least tacit, by microsoft. now, of course, they can claim to be purging "anyone who doesn't meet microsoft's high moral standards." plausible deniability.
grr
TELL me they didn't orchestrate that themselves...
"We need something to fight that stupid Apple campaign. Hey! Let's turn the tables on them! Call that PR firm and tell them to make a 'I switched from Apple to XP because...' campaign!"
They're just making a scapegoat to hide the fact that their ad was so STUPID they wanted to blame somebody ELSE for it! That ad was LOADED with crappy Microsoft phrasing.
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
Just an FYI. Ad agencies and PR firms may have the appearance of being dishonest and what not, as you allege, but in the end, everything the ad agency or PR firm does is approved by SOMEONE on the client's side. Someone at Microsoft saw this, read it, and agreed to it - probably went through a couple of rounds of revisions to get the wording right and to choose which images to show in the article. Ad agencies don't just go off on their own and do whatever they think ought to be done. Thinking that is ludicrous.
Not only is the PR consultant who wrote the piece not at fault because it was approved by someone at Microsoft, but the initial concepts of the idea and each draft of the article was routed through various levels of higher-up directors, in an ad agency, you'd have a designer, an art director, a creative director and an account executive before the client even sees anything. I'm not sure how its structured in a PR firm, but its likely similar. For Microsoft to target one person for such an elaborate article is ridiculous.
Cheers.
I'm really not trolling here, and I'm not advocating MS in any way, but it seems that a lot of otherwise bright people are hung up on this being a Microsoft blunder when this happens everyday in advertising.
When you see an ad on TV for herpes medication, do you think that person really has herpes? Of course not - you couldn't pay anyone enough to do a commercial like that. They are paid actors, and nothing more. They may even hate the product they are selling.
The PR lady is nothing different; she was, in effect, a paid actor. So they made a false testimony, so what? Advertisers do that all the time to drum up business. It seems slimy and under-handed, but it's the way it works most of the time.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Not so sure about that. They have had their marketing come back and bite them in the ass before. One I remember is the whole Novell customer targeted marketing when they told many Novell Netware users that Novell was dead. I think they also made some ads a while back where they showed a person painted into a corner (and the paint color was Sun's color)
Anyway, my point is that I don't think they either
- don't pay attention to their marketing drones
- get off on causing contoversy (no such thing as bad press?)
- are so out of touch with reality that making up fictional switch stories sounded like a good plan
- All of the above
Hell, with all the money Ballmer and Gates make, I bet they can get some pretty powerful hallucinogens.today is spelling optional day.
One thing that differentiates this Microsoft snafu from Apple's initiative is that the Switchers are actually who they say they are...
I'll lean back on old steadfast Ockham's Razor and speculate that it's far more likely that NDA's were signed by the switchers to prevent a potential PR nightmare rather than to encapsulate coniving secrets about the honesty of the statements as depicted in the ads. For instance: I'm not trying to play the part of Apple Apologist here, I'm just always under the assumption that automatically bridging the gap between a couple pieces of evidence and reality with a conspiracy theory is almost never the most logical move...
I hate Grammar Nazi's
What's really alarming is that they apparently hired her to do this. So...they pay her money to write up the ad, then punish her?
Didn't you ever look at the screen when Windows9x/2000/Me/XP boots up? Sure looks like a flag to me.
.
Which explains the urge I get to salute every time my machine reboots...
Or how about that funky key between the Alt and Ctrl on US keyboards? Same freakin' flag, and after all these years it *still* gets in the way.
Even when I'm using KDE... *Sigh*
-- I'm a sig. Isn't meta humour funny?
In all honesty, this is one of the most reasonable bits I've heard from Ballmer. With the exception of the "castigate" comment, nothing came off as unreasonable or rediculous.
I mean, he even admits that they have a lot of work ahead of them to change the public's perception of the company, due to some of their questionable actions. He even admits that their *licensing* changes were a reason for people to not trust them.
This doesn't sound like Ballmer... Maybe they started him on Ritalin?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal