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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."
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.
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.
Having participated in this sort of work before, a "quote" is created by whatever marketing agency Company "X" hired to create the white paper, arrange press exposure, etc. They will write stuff up and make "quotes" which are then reviewed and approved by the executive being "quoted" (often as many as 10 or 15 revisions).
I've seen "interviews" where the whole thing is carefully scripted; the "interviewer" and the executive only see the final copy the day before (or even day of) the interview video is shot.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
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
This is completely serious. I've seen it all over the place. If an executive is quoted as saying something, all you can usually infer from it is that the text was run by that executive and permission was given to publish. You absolutely cannot ever asusme they actually originated the text. It continually surprises me that people are surprised by this. I thought everyone took this for granted these days.
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
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.
Um... yes? The entire point of this practice is to decieve people into thinking that the CEO/VP/whoever actually said that stuff (even if they did sign off on it personally, after reading it personally, which is probably not how it happens, it's still not the same as saying it). Now that I'm aware of it, I won't be fooled anymore, but people who don't work in PR are not aware that PR people do this.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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.
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.