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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."
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.
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?
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!)
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.
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....
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.
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.
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
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!
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
Seems to me that this article is primarily interesting not because of what it reveals about microsoft, but because of what it reveals about office documents.
I would hope that people who read about this think " I wonder if anything compromising is in my documents". Perhaps then they will begin to realize that for all it's abilities there are risks to using office. Perhaps they will seek out other options.
So i guess what I am saying is that while this article is a silly anti-microsoft writeup on the surface, on closer inspection, it is still anti-microsoft, but adresses an extremely important privacy issue in a product which many people rely on daily.
Let's make a difference
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?
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?
-- 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.
>> It's not very interesting, and reveals almost
>> no new information
May not be interesting to you, but I enjoyed the read.
Why do you complain about this, when it would take less effort to close the browser?
It's like those people that complain about things they don't like but really don't affect them. Take the old^H^H^Hpeople who complain to the FCC about Howard Stern. If they're that offended, why do they continue to list? Turn the station.
Tip to parent: Try the back button if you don't like what you see.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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 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....)
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.
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?