Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Taps Bloggers to Promote Longhorn
Tim writes "With Beta 1 of Longhorn less than two months away, Microsoft is looking at a new marketing tool to help promote its new Windows: bloggers. According to BetaNews, Microsoft's "Team 99" evangelism effort will be composed of bloggers that will become Microsoft's voice to the masses. Robert Scoble said Team 99 was once secret, but has been revived and Microsoft is now accepting nominations. It's nice to see Microsoft recognizing the power of blogs, but the move is likely going to draw accusations that Redmond is trying to buy off bloggers to hype Longhorn."
Now Microsoft's stealing ideas from politicians, too.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
...slashbots read what they want to read and interpret the article through their monochromatic lens. This is NOT underhanded shilling of the products, it's a way for Microsoft to distill comments from the community to learn how to better improve Longhorn, and I quote "All will need to sign NDAs cause there are things in Longhorn that we don't want to leak out, but they'll be your proxies. They'll tell us where we're screwing up, what we're doing well, and will be world's top authorities on Longhorn." The reason they want bloggers is becasue bloggers provide a two-way communication between the community of users and Microsoft. Bloggers will take the comments from their sites, distill them into meaningful suggestions for ways to improve Longhorn and Microsoft can then in turn provide these very same bloggers with access to updates on Longhorn to report back to the community of users. Simple enough but as usual slashbots prove they are dumber than your average bear and could do the world a favor by shutting up unless they themselves have something meaningful to add to the discussion.