Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft PR: Looking Under The Hood
mtr writes "An interesting article uncovering some embarassing and amusing PR practices of our friendly software giant had been recently published by Michael Zalewski. The author recovered change tracking information from all the DOCs published on microsoft.com, and came up with something to cheer you up. It's funny when it happens to others - but even better if it fires back on themselves.
Read the full story here."
And he's writing a book for No Starch Press due in August :@)
It's called "Silence on the Wire" and he is One Smart Dude (TM).
Full disclosure - I work for No Starch Press.
Hyperic Community Manager
Don't you wish we had the same thing for White House internal memoranda?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Wait for it.....
wait for it....
GO!
Now even Microsoft is in on the tired^H^H^H^H^Hclassic "^H" joke!
Oh come on, Debian isn't that big...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
By definition an effective PR person cannot be embarassed by the stuff that comes out of his/her mouth. The bastards lie -- err -- "manage the truth" with no shame at all.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"our friendly software giant"
Is that sarcasm?
This makes me harken back to the days of yore...
Nothing cheers me up as much as watching something backfire on Microsoft.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
Odd... that tool linked to in the article and again in the post, links to a tool that removes all traces of office from the operating system, it has nothing to do with tracking changes or removing them from documents.
The key difference here is that the tracking reveals internal versions that were obviously never meant to be public. The idea that a draft would attribute a quote to a nameless executive is particularly appalling!
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
did anyone else see that .cx address and have a slight moment of hesitation before clicking through?
From the article:
Call me paranoid, but all those "xxx, Chief Information Officer/Vice President at Avensis" quotes make it look as if they were fabricated prior to even figuring out who to talk to at the company, not to mention determining what his/her name would be.
Could it be that the Author of the memo heard a taped recording of the comments, and transcribed them without knowing the guy's name, thus leaving placeholders?
I don't think that even M$FT would stoop so low as to intentionally misquote someone. They'd never get away with it.
wbs.
Huh?
Don't worry, Sir Haxalot will make sure you see it, one way or another.
Between Microsofts marketing attempts - Windows ME, the BSOD on stage, the DOCs with changes in them that insult users or other companties - it almost seems like Microsoft marketing is trying not to sell to users.
It would be fantastic to find out that MS is actually some kind of joke gone wrong. Like,
"Hey, lets make a really bad operating system and see what happens."
"Holy cow, they are buying it!"
"Man, thats insane, lets make another one and see if they still fall for it."
"Jesys, can't these people learn? I know, lets hype up something that doesnt exist and then not bother releasing it."
"Woah, demand is so high we can afford to pay for it to be made."
"Why not, but insert some easter eggs that make it crash. That should let them realise it's all a big farce."
Beep beep.
I have had Rackspace do the same thing when I worked for a company that was a major Rackspace customer. Their PR team provided some quotes and the CEO of our company picked the ones he liked and attached his name to them.
It happens all the time.
Google Cache
Micrsoft releases final drafts onto the web... but WAIT! we can see their ROUGH DRAFTS TOO!!! I'm sorry, but there wasn't anything embarrassing about any of that. It's not like Bill Gates himself or anyone high up in the company is the one who initially wrote those documents. And besides, they were corrected... so i don't get it... who cares? this is not news. (anyone want to see the rough draft to my english paper!?!? it's HORRIBLE! how embarrassing!)
It's not very interesting, and reveals almost no new information. It's just more tired old drivel designed to embarass Microsoft and generate another flame-war.
Slashdot has long become a sad parody of itself nowadays.
where are the SCO articles?!! I need my fix man!
sig != null
As per subject: http://www.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca/~z2u3/lcamtuf.coredump. cx/strikeout/index.html
wow... If microsoft can write a piece of software to remove one of their own programs, they could effortlessly write the world's most effective virus removal tool...
Mirror available at PlanetMirror now here.
CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet
Some of the conclusions are dubious. Most of this looks like fairly standard business practices.
For example xxxx CEO of blah said yyyy
may simply be the result of the employee drawing up the report not knowing the full name or title of the person who made the statement.
As for exact facts and figures about a customer being included, this looks like they got asked not to include them, or decided against it, and complied.
Where's the story here? There's plenty of more interesting things that go on. This is just pure MS bashing. Bashing any company you dislike for genuinely bad business practices this way is a fantastic way to come across as a lunatic with a chip on your shoulder, but not a good way to be taken seriously when pointing out a company's flaws.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
One of the examples in the article was was:
"Home Depot: evaluated both, chose Windows for 8,200 Windows desktops, 42,000 Windows embedded for POS devices,... "
Several devices that I have bought at Home Depot have been a POS, but I wsn't aware Windows was embedded in them. Is windows in every POS that Home Depot sells or just certain items?
I love when people get caught saying stupid things or saying they didnt say something when they did. I have a semi-photographic memory I will call it, I can pretty much remeber any conversation verbatim, nearly perfectly for as long as a year back with less than important conversations and pretty much forever if it was of some special importance. I think its because I have this ability that it absolutley drives me NUTS when people say they didnt say something, to have trackingin word docs..too funny. Did so say that ...no I didnt.....errrr yes you did here it is......uhhh no I didnt.....wasnt me....
+5 Insightful? It was supposed to be a bad joke. Next time I'll post flamebait while logged in, so fewer mod points get wasted.
Anyone post a mirror?
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I guess Microsft thinks its better to ignore the problem than solve it, if the solution is not yours. What's the worst that could happen? ;)
... and not separating data and metadata. If they would rather hold their document's metadata in database separate of the document, this would never happen. Nah, why would I care? At least its fun :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Everything described on that site is standard operating procedure for technology marketing/pr departments. Case studies, customer/analyst quotes, etc. are often drafted ahead of time and then sent to the company/analyst for approval. And of course straightforward engineer-speak ("our monopoly") is massaged into marketing-speak ("our large installed base of satisfied customers").
"They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
A lot of people are talking about the quote with the xx's.. this is common practice in PR, we write the quotes in the release, they sign off on them.
Did you actually think the pr people were interviewing the ceo for a press release?
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
While it is certainly possible to ascribe less than pure motives to all the instances documented in the story, if one applies Occam's razor, one can come up with a simpler but not as interesting explanation : this is the way big business works. In a multi-national corporation, different people collaborate. They have different personalities, and some are more antagonistic than others. Some people are asked to produce marketing materials and others are asked to review them for factual accuracy. Ultimately, before a document is published, several reviewers will go through it, and it would be shocking if edits were not made.
For example, the first example talks about changing the "deploying" to "evaluating". What exactly is damning about this? Perhaps when the marketing material was written, Aventis had plans to deploy and this got changed later. Or maybe, there are some reasons why Aventis, even though it is actually deploying, may not actually want their names used as a reference for the tablet PC. There are a million and one innocuous (sp?) reasons why the change was made, but yeah, they arent as fascinating as the interpretation made on the site.
Another example - the Robbie Bach / Sandy Duncan mixup. Organizational chains are quite tangled in large corporations and can change quite frequently. The author might simply not have had the right information on who was actually in charge - especially if both were Senior Vice Presidents and connected with XBox.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
By definition an effective PR person cannot be embarassed by the stuff that comes out of his/her mouth. The bastards lie -- err -- "manage the truth" with no shame at all.
Right you are.
The term "spin doctor" doesn't go far enough -- "doctor" is too vague -- in this age of specialists, a better title would be "spin anesthesiologist".
-kgj
-kgj
I wish they had published this one, because it is just too easy to bite in...
... " What's wrong with an analyst asserting his opinion and a vendor leveraging it to gain competitive advantage? First, the analyst opinion is unfounded and, as it happens, flat out wrong."
"Gordon Benett, Aberdeen Group analyst, in his October 2001 article,"
Well, to begin with that explains why they took that passage out, because it would otherwise have been a passage of an analyst asserting his opinion and a leveraging it to gain competitive advantage: The exact point he's trying to convey as being wrong (the pot/kettle effect). As if the Aberdeen Group doesn't have very big vested pro-MS interests, ok sure, yeah.
And huh? Since when can a opinion be right or wrong. I'm not a linguist, and english is not my first language either, but as far as I know an opinion is not a fact, but is it a subjective assertion, which is incapable of possessing the property of being either right or wrong.
But it gets better:
"But even if it had a modicum of merit, steering the market away from Microsoft in the wake of cyber-terrorist actions would be grossly wrong-headed."
Besides the more than modicum of merit represented by the overall and detailed security track record of Apache versus IIS... Tell me again, who had the unfounded opinions?
Wow.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Is that glassnost or peristroika? Ignore the spelling. Just answer the question. Thanks in advanced.
What?
One can dabble about form, tone, and words for weeks, but when it comes down to it, what matters if you have something viable to say.
.. its presumed you have good things to say, then it'll work or at least not backlash. Please keep in mind this is MBA level stuff.
If not, that's where PR breaks down, (see Dubya)
That's also why PR for damage control after something went wrong is wasted money from the start. It always breaks down. But they'll spend it anyway. The lesser of sciences tend to have the strongest dogma's. And this PR/MBA stuff is certainly a disgrace to science to be ranked with it.
This stuff looks more like a wannabee's homework though. Funny to read I must say.
I can't keep giving it away. You know, it doesn't grow on trees, and the free ride is over man. I can hook you up, but it's gonna cost $699 a hit...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Google's Cache
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
All Microsoft DOC files at Microsoft.com
Over 22,000 word files on their site. Assuming they are all still there, that is a lot of cleaning up to do. I wonder what else people will find.
Perhaps more Microsoft employees should Check this link out
And here is the Google cached copy.
<html>
<head>
<!-- hand-made html -->
<title>[strike out]</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor=black text=white link=lightgreen alink=red vlink=white>
<br>
<font size=+0 face="helvetica,arial">
<img src="strikeout.jpg" width=700 height=158 alt="[Strike that out, Sam]">
<p>
<font size=-2 color=black>
[ This page must be rendered with a browser that is capable
of rendering visually distinct output for <s>strikethrough</s> and
<u>underline</u> attributes. Some text-based browsers (links)
may not handle this
properly, and so you are advised to switch to graphics. ]
</font>
<p>
This is not an exciting story:
I happened to be browsing aimlessly through case studies and other
publications released by <a href="http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft</a>
as a part of their <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/getthefacts/">"Get
the facts"</a>
initiative. At one point, I stumbled upon a Word file I wanted to
read - and as soon as I ran it through
<a href="http://wvware.sf.net/">wvWare</a>, I noticed there is a good
deal of amusing change tracking information still recorded within the
document.
Naturally, publishing documents with "collaboration" data is not unheard
of in the corporate world, but the fact Microsoft had became a victim of
their own technology, and had failed to run their
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003/too ls/BoxA13.htm">own
tools</a> against these publications makes it more entertaining.
On a more serious note, it serves as a good warning it is really difficult
to manage this, and that inline filtering tools on SMTP gateways and in
web publishing systems may be necessary in some corporate environments.
<p>
A pointless idea came to my mind that instant: why not run a gentle web
spider against all Microsoft sites in English, specifically looking for
other instances of tracking data not removed from documents?
I coded a bunch of scripts and let them run through the night, fetching
approximately 10,000 unique documents; over 10% was
identified as containing change tracking records. I decided to collect only
those with deleted text still present, yielding a crop of over 5% of all
documents. Quite impressive. Below, you will find a brief (and rest
assured, incomplete) list of the most entertaining samples I've run into,
along with some speculation (and <b>only</b> speculation) as to the
reasons we see them.
<p>
NOTE: Although some of the findings discussed here may be moderately
embarassing for the company in question, I am not trying to make Microsoft
look bad, and I do not think they are
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=145674">p articularly evil</a>.
It's just quite entertaining to have a peek at the inner workings...
<font color=yellow>I believe the analysis posted here meets the
fair use criteria and does not disclose trade secrets - because it is a
critical review of short excerpts of publicly available resources and
data accessible with a click of a button in Microsoft Word - but I am
not willing to dispute it too vigoriously if I receive a cease-and-desist
letter. As such, enjoy <a href=/photo/current/>it</a> while it lasts. </font>
<p>
I've reviewed hundreds of documents, with recorded changes ranging from
very minor (spelling, changed dates, slight reformatting, rewording to
avoid being sued) to some very heavy
editing in research papers; I have also spotted several "multiple use"
delete-and-rewrite documents for financial briefs, customer briefs and so
forth, and noticed
that a great number of documents retain bogus titles from previous
uses (I suppose the "template" mechanism is not particularly popular
in the c
Now there is a reason why Word is better. I can't see any of the old versions of the file using OpenOffice.org.
I've known quite a few "communications specialists" (I think the term "PR" has been out of vogue for 20+ years now) that have been embarrassed by what they have said; when it comes back to them. I would rephrase the basic statement as:
The most effective PR people know how to shade the truth/lie in such a way that the message, regardless of how misleading, cannot be challenged as being inaccurate.
An experienced communications specialist would come out with the statement:
"The Senator is taking a hiatus from active service to better understand how to reduce his own reliance on foreign products while minimizing any potential financial repercussions."
which is much better than saying:
"The Senator is drying out at the Betty Ford clinic after realizing that he can no longer afford to drink Chivas by the boatload."
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Does anyone else see the potential humor factor in sending the people memos with deliberately corrected info?
It's a whole new realm of sarcasm.
> Call me paranoid, but all those "xxx, Chief Information
> Officer/Vice President at Avensis" quotes make it look as if
> they were fabricated prior to even figuring out who to talk to
> at the company
Everyone knows Microsoft deserves bashing for what they do, but this isn't one of those times. I've had to do my share of edits to press releases, and it's not unusual for the quote associated with an executive is written by a PR person. All big companies do this.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Actually, based on their domain name, I'd guess their server dumped the core.
This isn't journalism, this is a press release -- professional marketing people _always_ write quotes for people to "say" because they know what they want said. I don't know how many times marketing people have written quotes to attribute to me. They review it with the person they're "quoting" to make sure that it's OK, of course. So all we're seeing here is normal press release editing -- the marketing person comes up with something gushing and a rough idea of who ought to "say" it, and in the editing process it turns into an actual person saying something more reasonable. So while it's a certainly a bit embarassing seeing internal comments released to the public, there's nothing shocking or incriminating here.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Funny how things let out into the wild can include unintended information.
/. see them? Eugh.
I mean, I guess it's cool to have your lady's[1] boobies on your arty photo website, but to have all
[1] Or at least, your favourite model's
I hope this doesn't get modded down as redundant or off-topic, because it's a legitimate question, but I'm wondering how to view metadata.
I've seen stories about it before, but there wasn't anything interesting enough to make me want to check it out until now. I noticed Zalewski linked to wvware in his article, but I didn't really understand how to view metadata with it. I am also running a Satan-worshipping OS.
So really I'm just wondering if someone can tell me what program to use to view hidden data, or explain how to get wvware to do it?
Thanks.
Employers will demand that you submit your resume in Word format when they get wind of this!
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
In May of 1995, I was shocked and surprised to read in Byte Magazine about how Penn State University had saved so much money and had such a massive increase in reliability by switching all of their network resources over to Windows NT. I was so surprised, because I read about it while waiting for a computer in the most advanced student lab at the time, and I saw not hide nor hair of Windows NT.
The Byte article quoted CAC higher-ups about how NT greatly improved security, file and print serving, and that all student labs had switched over wholesale. At this time, the file serving was handled by a Banyan Vines network, and printing being spooled by old Mac SE/30's.
By that fall, Windows NT was finally introduced to the labs, and the nightmare of having 100% BSOD boxes and useless labs had begun. When I graduated in the fall of 1996, printing was still handled by Macs, but usually PowerMac 6100's by that point. NT had lost all credibility at Penn State, and Microsoft had used them to hoodwink many large organizations with a totally fallacious article in Byte.
-- Len
I've often heard it speculated about how many hits a site receives due to slashdot.. He's a hint "You are a visitior number 2266262. "
Kerry: The Republic leadership are fascist motherf^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H out of touch with their genitals^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the American people.
Bush: Kerry is a drunken^H^H^H^H^H^H^H vacillating liberal who likes crack whores^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H will raise taxes.
Nader: I am still committed to causing confusion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H providing an alternative in the political process.
I just sent a suggestion to Google that they should index deleted and revised text in Word documents. Wouldn't that be fun?
Wow, his counter incrimented 3849 times while I read the page.
From the article
"Call me paranoid, but all those "xxx, Chief Information Officer/Vice President at Avensis" quotes make it look as if they were fabricated prior to even figuring out who to talk to at the company, not to mention determining what his/her name would be.
MS did a draft press release regarding a product we produced using MS technology and they quoted my boss in it. I happen to know that he signed off on the quotes and didn't actually write any of them.
I guess I really am sort of scared of MS because I clicked the Log Out button before posting this. That said, I guess if the CEO signs off on it it's no different that celebs using Ghostwriters.
...Assuming they read the article.
If someone reads the article, they would now know that:
Home Depot uses/did use: "Windows for 8,200 Windows desktops, 42,000 Windows embedded for POS devices, 1,000 licenses of Visio, 1,000 licenses of Project, 200 Windows Servers"
Metro C&C (major German retailer): uses/did use "8,000 Windows XP(e) clients, 8,000 SQL CALs, 8,000 Windows 2000 Server CALs, 320 SQL Servers and 320 Windows 2000 Servers"
and
Ameritrade: "on 5 Windows 2000 servers. This deployment is scheduled to expand to hundreds of Windows 2000 servers."
---
I'm not suggesting anything, of course. But I think CIOs, CTOs, etc need to THINK before they let anyone know what kind of installation base they have.
Want to tell us what brand and version of firewall you have installed too? So... Are you using those fancy Cisco routers that this newly released program can fiddle with? How do you transfer data between locations?.. FTP?
Dude, really, repeat after me; "I am special. I have powers no other mortal possesses. Someday my father will return from the stars to take me away from this mundane world."
I'll bet you're a little bit psychic, too. Lots of people have good memories. Your special power is that you remember trivia that other people know is not worth remembering, and think it makes you a super-dude.
Get over yourself.
-- Len
The point was not whether xxx, CIO was used. The point was that Microsofts response to the problem illustrated here has been "it isn't a problem download and use our tools", while they themselves do not.
... oh wait I'm on slashdot nevermind.
This illustrates the underlying problem. Features such as this that require seperate tools to sanitize them will tend to not produced sanitized documents.
The author of the article said that the result of this "exposure" demonstrates a likely need for inline filtering in mail and web publishing systems to correct this MS oversight and stubbornness.
Had many of you read the
[Post version 2.0]
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
fdisk /mbr will do you absolutely no good if you're infected with a boot virus, simply because the new boot sector written by fdisk will be infected as well. e.g. NYBOOT, STONER, etc..
--- sig moved for great justice.
I detest MS both for its business practices and products, but this is one instance in which bashing them is just plain ignorant.
I looked at the all the samples in the first page of the story, and I have to say that I didn't see anything that didn't look like normal editing decisions being made by writers and editors in the PR business. I was a newspaper journalist for years and I'm a political consultant now. I've received and written tons of news releases over the years. Unless there is some horrid "smoking gun" hidden on one of the interior pages, there is nothing sinister or unusual in the least about what the guy found.
What I saw looked more like examples from a PR writing textbook about how things are changed to reflect an editor's preferences to soften a story or to change its focus. Quotes are almost ALWAYS written by PR people and then approved by the person being quoted. In some cases, the quote is used as is. In others, the person will say that he prefers to say something different. The quotes as written give everyone an idea of the TYPE of quote needed for a certain spot in order to fall into line with the rest of the piece.
Ultimately, this is no different than anything else which is written and then changed along the way. New information comes along. There are differences in opinion about how something should be "spun." Editors use judgment about what will work best. A ton of things happen, but that is normal.
As I said, I can't stand MS and I think the company is blatantly dishonest in many of its practices, but these seem to be reasonably innocent examples of PR people attempting to do their jobs. If you understand how PR works, you will know that there is nothing unusual here.
As always...
Hence the 99.99999%, format takes care of the other 0.00001%
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
An experienced communications specialist would come out with the statement:
"The Senator is taking a hiatus from active service to better understand how to reduce his own reliance on foreign products while minimizing any potential financial repercussions."
Please, that is SO pre Bush Administration. Their stye of communications would give the following press release:
"There is no Senator, there never has, and there never will be. And if their was, the notion that he is in rehab is insulting and unpatriotic. You must be a member of the Taliban"
I note that Bill Gates is one of the largest single shareholders in Home Depot, if not THE largest. Is there any surprise here that Home Depot is bending over backwards to accommodate their big stockholder?
But I'm more interested in Aventis Pharmaceuticals. Gates is shifting all his personal wealth into Big Pharma stocks. I haven't been able to find out if he's an investor in Aventis, but he's a huge investor in their direct competitors. I can just see the pitch MS made, they'll offer Aventis a tech testbed platform, and if they don't go for it, they'll offer it to one of Bill's cronys, and Aventis will have difficulty with MS support in the future.
Um... no.
You are not living in reality, or have not been exposed to any large "enterprise" in the last 50 or 60 years. The CEO nor even anyone at the client writes the FUD. This is the domain of PR firms, as a few zillion posts above this have stated.
Another thing PR firms are good at is re-writing text to exclude words like "um...".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I am a visitior number 2288382.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Once I know I need to write a news release, I work out a plan. This includes goals, target audiences, media tools, means of measurement, key messages and key sources. If I need to involve external sources (the people I quote), I ask those companies for their consent to write a release. Depending on the relationship, they may send me the quotes *or* I might write quotes for them and have them approve them later.
It's often the last minute before the other company's senior execs, marketing staff, PR agency, lawyers, clients, or other stakeholders decide who they'll let me quote. They may have long debates over whether they want their quote attributed to the CEO, VP, client, Martian Sales Director, General Manager for Neptune, etc. It all depends on how they want to position their own quotes. And that's assuming they even wrote them. Whenenver I've had to deal with Microsoft, they've taken a week or more to approve a news release.
Virtually the same scenario takes place at my end. Various stakeholders provide input, and both the quotes and the sources (e.g. CIO) can change.
In my experience, anyone who ends up being quoted has to sign off on the quote. There are review processes. It's not like those people weren't involved.
When a CEO or other exec has a "real" interview with the press, the CEO reads from notes and statements that a marketer wrote. Before the interview starts, a marketer goes over all the notes and helps suggest possible questions and answers. The marketer sits in on the interview and (if cameras aren't present or it's over the phone) may help the exec piece together answers. Everything is heavily scripted. Eventually, the execs know the words by heart, or pretty close.
You can compare this process to the one used for professional speech writing, memos, letters, ghostwritten articles, and briefing notes. In fact, when I was just a co-op student, I was writing briefing notes, "question period responses", and other materials for the Canadian Minister of Immigration. Whether in a corporate or goverment environment, spokespersons rarely speak off the cuff. Except for Dan Quayle.
And, while I'm sure some people are horrified by the process, it has many advantages. Messages are consistent. Speakers/sources are handpicked for credibility, ability to talk, and relevance. All the messages have been pre-screened by legal teams, reducing risk. It's less likely that the exec will over-commit us, say something incorrect about a feature/benefit, or go off-topic. And the investment in marketing is maximized. And that's good for the company.
-- SYS 64738 --
I'm sorry, but this AC is just clueless. PR can be dishonest, just like most things can, but there is nothing dishonest in having someone write a quote for someone else. If that's dishonest, then it's dishonest anytime someone else writes another person's words. A person who gives a speech written by a speechwriter would be dishonest by that standard. What about an actor? He rarely writes his own words.
Some CEOs ARE clueless and stupid about their own products, but the practice of having a writer show how to pitch an idea which is being sold to the public is not dishonest. To say it is shows a gross misunderstanding of how ideas are sold in EVERY part of life.
I normally file, without reading, any resumes I recv in msword format. (Anybody who sends a resume in a proprietary format is clearly an amateur programmer. Qualified people always send text or html.) After reading this, thought it would be fun to run those resumes through the same process. I knew people exaggerated, but damn was this funny. From work experience to education, nearly all 211 resumes had significant changes. Amazing how often these people changed their degree/school. In one case, the years of attendance had shifted by 18 yrs!
their current CIO is apparently buddies with MonkeyBoy. The rumor was that they were going to migrate to linux and even had some units being field tested. Then MonkeyBoyBuddy becomes CIO and cans all of it & mandates MSFT from top to bottom, no matter what it cost. I'm sure the shareholders loved that huge waste of capital.
Amen. What kind of issues does this guy have? Does he play with himself thinking about the 4 people who are going to read his post(s) before they are banished to -1 hell? I've been known to waste sometime but I've never been that bored. Really dude...$10 says you're a virgin (and will be until you're 27...and she's really a man.)
The sad thing is he thinks that people will empathize with him -- he doesn't get the joke at all. Debian is huge (how many CD's these days? 10+?) in various ways -- install base, growth, # of packages. Even those who hate Debian the OS still love Debian the company or at least Debian the innovator. God bless apt-get! I let out a bit of a laugh when I read your post BTW.
Defenders of the indefensible. I guess if you decided that shuffling papers for somebody else just wasn't enough, and thought you could get rich 'in computers', so spent all your money on a M$ cert only to discover that it is LAUGHABLY USELESS, you would cover your ass whenever anybody criticized M$ too. Otherwise you might be embarrassed about the three or four whole weeks of your life (and x thousands of $$$) you devoted to the joke that is M$ certification. So if you are one of those suckers and you see criticism of M$ someplace, you had better wade in thick and fast.
I just tried one of the linked docs in Open Office.
Edit/Changes/Show
What do you know?
OpenOffice filters are pretty good.
I guess it's another case that security by obscurity doesn't work?
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Having worked keeping everything running for a small PR business, let me share some insights into press releases.
Everyone in the company reads and reviews them (except me, of course, for good reason). Quotes are written with a place holder for a name ("XXX" was what I saw most often), just as place holders are used for dates. The release goes back and forth to the client company as many times as it takes to get it signed off on, and somewhere along the line the quote gets attributed (but probably gets heavily edited before then).
The only thing surprising about these is how little editing there is. MS must be cranking them out.
On the converse, every now and then I would hear a statement like "I've got an hour to write a press release, and no idea what it's about." This was said in such a way that I assume it translates to "I've got all night and a case of jolt to finish this problem."
I once made the mistake of proclaiming that there was probably one sentence of content in each press release. This was laughed at, and I was told there was less.
If I ever start a major OSS project, I'm going to call in a favor to get professional press releases written by my ex-coworkers. If I have the money they are even going out on the wire (or at least one of them).
nnooiissee
There's no "but" after "I hate MS" and there shouldn't be. Don't use "but" after any negative statement about MS.
I was wondering what happened to Microsoft's old catch-phrase 'Digital Nervous System.' It was devoured by Microsoft Word, as seen in the revision history of this document.
---
Of course Microsoft has a marketing department. Of course they want to exagerate the truth, when doing so will help sell product.
Of course that's what their so called "Get the Facts Straight" initiative seems to be about: warping the truth and defaming Open Source Software solutions to give their own products big phantom advantages in business people's minds.
The article doesn't bring up anything new to write home about or seem to particularly implicate Microsoft. Since they actually made those edits, the best anyone can do with them is speculate, which we can most clearly do without the edits. And nothing new is really brought to light.
Unless I'm misremembering the law, the DMCA criminalizes "circumventing" any "security" systems.
Now, claiming that Word's editing features are a security mechanism and that bypassing them is illegal would be ridiculous.
Unfortunately, no more ridiculous than, say, claiming that pdf e-books are a security system are that even foreign nationals bypassing them are US criminals.
I don't like MS products and many of its business practices. That's a reasonable position to take, although you're free to your own apparent disagreement. But if you are stupid enough to lump everyone who has legitimate problems with MS together with those who just bash reflexively for no good reason, you're probably past any hope of reasoning. But it's TRULY goofy to make your questionable point as a reply to a post where I'm actually defending MS.
The first thing I thought of was the fact that he used some other software for the sole purpose of "reverse engineering" a Word document. Then, I thought about the fact that a Word document has become so convoluted with extra XML and unneccesarily metadata that yes, in fact, you DO have to reverse engineer a document to get the archived data. Don't know why. Just thought the concept was kinda funny. I can see the spin on that one: "He used Linux to reverse engineer our documents! Linux is a tool designed just for that, and should be outlawed!" We ARE talking about PR people here, and especially some who have just been ridiculed in public. =)
Can you ping me now? Gooood! | Manhappenin.Net - Things to do
Since I've already commented in this thread, I can't give you the extra mod point that you deserve, but that is an excellent explanation of the process.
:-)
Having most Slashdot people comment about the process of PR makes as little sense as having PR people read and comment about source code.
Would calling it the '^H' joke instead have supressed the character substitution?
A separate Add-in tool is available for removing hidden data from Office XP/2002/2003 applications.
Ameritrade: After several months of schedule slips trying to implement Linux, the Ameritrade CIO resigned. Within a month, the new CIO deployed Ameritrade's most strategic apps, their Stream Quotes Servers, on Windows 2000
Anybody know more about this? Deploying a mission-critical service on Windows servers seems a lunatic thing to do.
fdisk /mbr will do you absolutely no good if you're infected with a boot virus, simply because the new boot sector written by fdisk will be infected as well. e.g. NYBOOT, STONER, etc..
Why am I replying to this? I thought it was common knowledge to boot from a non-infected source to virus removal work.
If you boot from an infected copy, this is true a reinfection will be likely. Boot from an original IBM or MS boot disk. You know the one, it's the one without a write protect switch, not the bootleg writable (infectable) copy. Read only devices seldom get infected.
The truth shall set you free!
All marketing information is clearly as close to lies as necessary, and any competent geek would cut off their net connection rather than make a decision based on it.
All marketing is aimed at CI/EOs because they're the only ones dumb enough to think it might be relevent.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
This is not an exciting story: I happened to be browsing aimlessly through case studies and other publications released by Microsoft as a part of their "Get the facts" initiative. At one point, I stumbled upon a Word file I wanted to read - and as soon as I ran it through wvWare, I noticed there is a good deal of amusing change tracking information still recorded within the document. Naturally, publishing documents with "collaboration" data is not unheard of in the corporate world, but the fact Microsoft had became a victim of their own technology, and had failed to run their own tools against these publications makes it more entertaining. On a more serious note, it serves as a good warning it is really difficult to manage this, and that inline filtering tools on SMTP gateways and in web publishing systems may be necessary in some corporate environments.
A pointless idea came to my mind that instant: why not run a gentle web spider against all Microsoft sites in English, specifically looking for other instances of tracking data not removed from documents? I coded a bunch of scripts and let them run through the night, fetching approximately 10,000 unique documents; over 10% was identified as containing change tracking records. I decided to collect only those with deleted text still present, yielding a crop of over 5% of all documents. Quite impressive. Below, you will find a brief (and rest assured, incomplete) list of the most entertaining samples I've run into, along with some speculation (and only speculation) as to the reasons we see them.
NOTE: Although some of the findings discussed here may be moderately embarassing for the company in question, I am not trying to make Microsoft look bad, and I do not think they are particularly evil. It's just quite entertaining to have a peek at the inner workings... I believe the analysis posted here meets the fair use criteria and does not disclose trade secrets - because it is a critical review of short excerpts of publicly available resources and data accessible with a click of a button in Microsoft Word - but I am not willing to dispute it too vigoriously if I receive a cease-and-desist letter. As such, enjoy it while it lasts.
I've reviewed hundreds of documents, with recorded changes ranging from very minor (spelling, changed dates, slight reformatting, rewording to avoid being sued) to some very heavy editing in research papers; I have also spotted several "multiple use" delete-and-rewrite documents for financial briefs, customer briefs and so forth, and noticed that a great number of documents retain bogus titles from previous uses (I suppose the "template" mechanism is not particularly popular in the company) - but this is not particularly exciting. Most hillarious edits I stumbled upon are closely related to "hot" topics - new technology salespitch (XBox, Tablet PC), Linux-vs-Windows war and so forth. So let us begin:
The first interesting document is a Tablet PC deployment case study for Aventis, a pharmaceutical company (resulting of a merger of Rhone-Poulenc and Hoechst):
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/tablet pc launch/docs/aventisCS.doc (Anika Lehde, Melanie Higgs, Mary Riordan Schactler)
Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is deployinghas evaluated the Tablet PC running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition as a new productivity tool for the lab and the field. Clinical trial associates (CTAs) and chemists are using participated in a pilot to compare the Tablet PC instead of with their regular notebook PCs for its to evaluate its power, mobility, and pen-based computing data entry capabilities.
The CTAs found that the Tablet PC provideds an unobtrusive waya workflow advantage to electronically save record clinical data while interviewing clinicians participating in Aventis drug trialsduring routine monitoring visits, potentially. The company estimates this will savinge up to two hours a day in rekeying data per associate. , contributing to a potential cost savings of U.S.$1 million a
Access Denied by SmartFilter: Forbidden, this page is categorized as Sex.
Silence, Gentoo fanboy!
And why do I keep seeing all of these MS banner ads on /. which repeatedly try to tell me that MS implementation is cheaper, faster, and better?
If night school taught Linux maintenance there wouldn't be any additional intellectual cost to Linux startup and the long-term savings due to better coding, design, and implementation would add up quickly. MS only demonstrates the far reaching power of its megalopoly.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
What is important is not that someone at Microsoft is interested in fact-checking. That's obvious; they don't want to get fired.
What is important is that these examples show clearly how Microsoft's evaluation of itself comes into being. First, someone who knows nothing about technical matters, and absolutely does not care about technical matters, quickly writes a complete fantasy. Then the fantasy is sent to some people who have a clue, who eventually eliminate the worst of the inventions.
The examples show that the fantasy writers have very little contact with anyone with technical knowledge. Otherwise they would start the fantasies a little closer to the truth, and save some editing cycles.
The examples show that the fantasy writers have very little contact with anyone with technical knowledge. Otherwise they would start the fantasies a little closer to the truth, and save some editing cycles.
And this differs from any other marketing department in any other company in the world how?
The bit about not using their own tools is just one more datum pointing to the notion that Microsoft has grown so quickly that, in many respects, nobody is in charge. Like, Microsoft Installer came out in 1999 or so, and five years later look at all the Microsoft products that still don't use it, or which use it in ways which negate its advantages. (Honorable mention: the Office team understands and uses MSI very well.)
For an outfit that's so much into domination and control, you'd think it would be a foregone conclusion that all publications would go through a formal release process that includes cleaning out all the leftovers which are not normally visible. But either no one is in charge of designing such processes, or whoever is really really goofed.
I suppose it could be an extension of the whole reactionary movement that grew up in PC-land: formal processes are the sort of thing IBM would do, so they're obviously wrong -- after all, look at how quickly IBM lost all their money and went out of business. (Oh, waitaminute....)
"Xbox is on track for an awesome European launch in fall 2001 early 2002," said Robbie Bach, senior vice president and chief Xbox officer Sandy Duncan, Vice President, Xbox Europe.
xbox forecast 6.1.2001 malreported launch rectify
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
...these aren't my real teeth.
LMAO. Debian rocks. You are stupid. Ha, ha
...it's just being amused by seeing MS not delete the metadata before putting the Word docs up on the web.
Making fun of someone isn't hating them - my brother/cousins/best friends and I joke with each other about lots of stuff, if you get my drift?
JR in WV
This is a very serious issue. Companies that employ enough people who actually understand the business of the company have a chance to survive and prosper. Companies who try to use cheaper, poorly educated employees, die. The death may happen slowly, and is usually difficult to see because of energetic attempts to hide the truth, but the death occurs. (Novell - now apparently rebuilding -, Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect Corporation, Corel, PowerSoft and many, many others are examples.)
Microsoft's numerous recent public relations mistakes, like its stupid attack on Open Office, show it is dying.
I am not intending to be anti-Microsoft when I say this. It would be best for me personally if Microsoft were a strong, healthy company. I and many, many people suffer when Microsoft is abusive or sloppy.
Don't overlook the complexities of this. It is possible for healthy processes and sick processes to be operating at the same time in the same company. It is impossible for a company on the way down to remake itself.
What you have the unique opportunity to see in these documents is the creative mind of the document writer at work, nothing more. There is no sinister plot being covered up, no secrets being loosed, just the edits of a tired writer. Putting xxx instead of a name, then going back to fill in that name isn't sinister..
.. confrontational, shall we say?
Writer: "I don't remember that person's name or correct spelling off-hand, I'll finish my thought and then go through my notes to find the correct information"
Tin-foil-hat-wearer: "Oh my god! The draft is attributing a quote to a nameless executive! How particularly appalling!"
The other instances shown in the referring webpage are merely areas where the writer exercised good judgement by changing sentences to flow better, be less confusing and less
While this article is useful in pointing out that even M$ does not avail themselves of their own tools before releasing documents to Internet+Dog, it also painfully points out that some people have way too much spare time on their hands.
> Please, that is SO pre Bush Administration.
Or, if you were asking my personal favorite spinmeister, Rummy:
Mr. Rumsfeld, is it true that the Senator is in rehab for a debilitating drug habit ?
If you're asking if the Senator is a good and honest man, then the answer is, absolutely he is.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Windows is in every PoS system everywhere, not just in Home Depot. Well, it depends on your definition of PoS I suppose ;-)
Several years back I was checking out travel sites, followed a link to expedia.com, and up comes a user agreement. I don't sign things that I haven't read, so I didn't click the [I Agree] button (conveniently located at the top of the page, so you didn't even have to scroll to the bottom to agree).
It quickly became clear that it was a draft version that had been reviewed - the comments were imbedded in the text! In plain text it said things like 'John, is this too clear?'! But my favourite was "We don't need this until we move into Europe, but I put it in now anyway"!!
Seems there was a bug in one version of Word that incorporated the text of those little yellow sticky note 'comments' as part of the final text. Hoist by their own petard.
I sent a note of to the webmaster, and the next time I went back it had changed. Wish I'd kept a copy, as they - no surprise - never acknowledged my message.
The fun begins when the company that you ask to sign off on a quote that you've crafted for them also knows how to play the game: That is, you get another quote back from them that has been equally carefully crafted with the purpose of - to put it bluntly - putting the spotlight on them instead of on you...
Then you send them back a new suggestion for a quote that shifts the focus back to you, and they mail you back a quote that moves the focus back to them again, etc, etc.
Finally a useless quote that nobody involved actually wants to use is arrived at (by now the important thing is that the other party signs off on it but that they too can be counted on to not want to use it) at which time everybody realizes that it's friday and it was way to long ago since they had a beer and the whole thing is forgotten...
...where absolutely everything Microsoft does is either evil, a slip-up, a conspiracy, an anti-competitive tactic, or just plain bad (and yet gets ripped off in the next versions of KDE/GNOME).
Meanwhile, several major OSS projects have been compromised in the span of the past six months, yet everyone has already forgotten. They'll just keep spewing the same BSOD "jokes" and security FUD.
This is standard, boring stuff.
Wake me up when a Word document ends a political career or starts a revolution.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It is impossible for a company on the way down to remake itself.
Neverunderestimate the power of vast cash reserves. IBM is a great example -- they suffered something like NINE consecutive years of severe losses into the early 90's. Microsoft isn't anywhere close to "dying", and it certainly can't be compared to the relatively tiny, limited companies you listed.
Microsoft has always had a rather poor-quality marketing department. It would be a mistake to draw many conclusions about the rest of the company from observations of their marketing group. (Ironically, that point greatly weakens my earlier post except in the rather limited context of their FUD efforts, which I certainly won't deny are real and often painfully transparent.)
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
is the link that goes to the Office admin software that supports actually removing Office or parts therof.
Notice the name of the program: ORK.EXE
Who at MS is now working on ELF.EXE - Eliminate Linux Forever?
Who is John Cabal?
Sorry, it was early in the morning. The sentence should have read, "It is NOT impossible..."
"Microsoft has always had a rather poor-quality marketing department."
Right. Combined with their rather poor-quality product department, they have relied entirely on their first-rate monopoly department.
--
make install -not war
But now they are losing their monopoly.
Please, that is SO pre Bush Administration. Their stye of communications would give the following press release: "There is no Senator, there never has, and there never will be. And if their was, the notion that he is in rehab is insulting and unpatriotic. You must be a member of the Taliban"
Not only that, we will find WMD's IN ONE HOUR!
Life is too short to proofread.