Microsoft Spending $120M To Look Smaller

Ant writes "Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Microsoft Corp. will spend $120 million a year on an advertising campaign to fight its image as "a huge American company." That sound you heard while reading the article is my head exploding.

Comments

Re:Incredible

[Karma Farmer]

This is a company with more employees than most cities have citizens,

Ummm... no. Microsoft has something like 50,000 employees. That won't even fill many major sports arenas and concert venues. Unless you live in Wyoming, it really doesn't compare to the population of a "real" city.

Re:It is small(ish)

[Mr. Sane]

I'm not sure what data you are referring to, but Microsoft's market cap is significantly larger than Wal-Mart's.

The market cap (taken from http://finance.yahoo.com/ of listed companies as of January 23, 2005:
    Microsoft: 280.49B
    Wal-Mart: 188.40B
    Apple: 65.46B
    Dell: 71.12B

Incorrect Title, RTFA please

[Sean0michael]

The article isn't about Microsoft trying to look smaller. It is about microsoft looking less American-centered. Since 1/3 of its business comes from outside the US, it only makes sense to start looking like Microsoft cares about each country that it sells in. It wants people to believe it cares about issues facing each country and region, not just American consumers far far away.

Kudos to those who have posted similar replies. Hopefully people will read these enough to get the message. Or perhaps this just proves that most of the /. community would rather read what they want than what is on the page.