Slashdot Mirror
Raunchy Dance Routine a PR Nightmare For Microsoft
theodp writes "GeekWire reports on the techno-dance routine that preceded Microsoft's Windows Azure presentation at the Norwegian Developers Conference this week, which featured a group of women jumping around on stage to a song that included several drug references and the line: 'The words MICRO and SOFT don't apply to my penis.' In a strange effort to be inclusive, a monitor displaying the lyrics added, 'or vagina.' The official Windows Azure YouTube channel has posted an apology for 'a skit that involved inappropriate and offensive elements and vulgar language,' and said it's actively looking into the matter. Hey, could've been worse — at least @ASUS wasn't live-tweeting the event!"
'The words MICRO and SOFT don't apply to my penis.' In a strange effort to be inclusive, a monitor displaying the lyrics added, 'or vagina.'
What in the hell is an "or vagina"? Is that new hardware slang for an OR gate?
My work here is dung.
developers, Developers, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS ?
I Love This Company!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Sorry.. was that a Loiter Squad skit?
I can't see any way that as not meant as an intentional parody.
Either way, or the writer was on drugs.
Oh yeah, it's the latter. Never mind.
"'The words MICRO and SOFT don't apply to my penis.'"
And the word "maturity" and "adulthood" don't seem to apply to your brain either.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
But that dance routine WAS a disaster.
Also, that's not Techno.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Now I'll finally get some use out of these condoms I've been hanging onto. For my penis. Or vagina.
I remember when they rolled out the Microsoft Mambo #5, it was so bad I had to leave the room so I wouldn't laugh in front of the customers. I don't know who thought this was a good idea, but they should be dragged to death behind a truck.
As an American I am only offended that the girls weren't hotter and the dance wasn't more sexy.
The words to the "song.." well, I can only say this: "Non Native Speaker."
I always thought that Microsoft made bad choices for music. For Windows 95 they used the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up, which contains the lyrics :
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
Which was fine for an adv. campaign, but then the next line always seemed weird for Microsoft to want to associate with:
You make a grown man cry
Yet in hindsight was amazingly prophetic in the context of Win95 .
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It could be worse. I discovered a famous furniture company's name means "ass" in Swedish from some engineers who couldn't stop laughing whenever they would see these boxes everywhere. I couldn't find it in the dictionary so it must be colloquial.
I wonder is there a way to search whether a made up brand name matches any word colloquial or not in any of the mainstream languages?
extends all the way down to their presentations. What 20-something newly minted "manager" was responsible for that, I wonder?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The harder Microsoft tries to look cool, the more they look like awkward social retards staring at their feet in the corner of the highschool dance. I'm hard pressed to think of a company with a worse public image -- aside from Haliburton and PG&E, who actually kill people to achieve profit.
Stupid and immature maybe. And since when are vaginas supposed to be big and hard?
not very good though.
sounds like scooter, but 100x worse. why couldn't they just steal some nice chiptune.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Seriously! I can't even begin to imagine how Apple would put on a, whatever this is... I'm sure the staff will be told they like it as well
I'm not signing anything
Dandy music, I glad the audience was paid to be there.
developers, Developers, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS ?
Since all their attempts just result in complete awkwardness, I know that Tim & Eric sometimes do product skits (like this board game) and I think that Microsoft should just go full intended awkward and hire Tim & Eric. That way nobody can make fun of them for being awkward and, like, twenty years from now they will be seen as doing comedy WAY ahead of its time.
My work here is dung.
I can't find a reference, but I believe they were Scooter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_(band)
Meh....
Lame lyrics and where's the raunchy dance? :D
Geekwire needs to check up on the state of music videos these days(the uncensored versions). Or maybe not, it will give them a heartattack.
And I get this? Come on, that looked like routine from my junior high talent show, but not as raunchy. This is more blatant headline sensationlism by Slashdot!
But I do so love the ESL lyrics.
Blue Jeans on Fire!
Chevrolet, Elvis!
Blue jeans on fire!
New York, let's go!
Every incident like this I've ever been involved with usually began with a staff meeting where everyone thought it would be a great idea to be young and hip by putting the young and hip guy in charge of some presentation. And it usually ended with said young and hip guy explaining why he honestly thought that having someone sing a rendition of "Cop Killer" to a backdrop of nude dancers would be appropriate for a presentation of of the company's annual shareholders' report.
Leave the musical numbers for the Oscars and the comedy skits for SNL. They already do them bad enough without you trying too.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I'll admit it... that was the best new software developer techno song that I've heard all year.
Does anyone know where I can download a cut with less background noise?
Didn't think it was all that bad. Sure it hurt my ears, but didn't touch my delicate sensibilities.
Looks like Microsoft is taking lessons from the General Accounting Office for The United States in regards to convention behavior.
Looks like a number of people haven't gotten the message yet that in 2012 if you behave badly, someone will see it as we live in the internet age and the age of Big Brother.
Dumbasses.
Microsoft had nothing to do with it.
Microsoft's official stance: If you aren't sure what something is, Bing(tm) it. Go to your XBox 360 with Kinnect and shout proudly "XBOX BING OR VAGINA".
Actually, we speak English just fine here [in Norway], even though it's a second language for most. English is after all a close cousin of the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German. It's closer to "native" than you would think.
I'm sorry to say we have no excuse for this silly little song, other than that we have a different culture and couldn't care less about offending "sensitive" foreigners :)
I haven't heard the song itself, but you might want to consider the fact that we also like to intentionally create songs that make a mockery of both our languages. It's called parody. Things are not always what they appear to be ;)
Yeah, but we don't have your GAO or sensitive nature in Norway, so what do we care?
This fits Microsoft's perennially pathetic marketing and PR to a T. They're like the clueless geek, always trying too hard to be cool, never succeeding.
Wait. Are you insulting or complimenting them? This is Slashdot, you know. I flatter myself that I have more sense of geeky things than of fashion and hipness.
Notice how many nerds are at the Microsoft party. True Geeks and nerds since no one was dancing, they were to scared of the pretty girls on stage. At an Apple party everyone would be dancing and going YEA!
Some low-level marketing functionaries pulled a good ol' boy stunt at the partner conference and got canned... similar to the Asus ad with the backside of the girl presenter.
So what.
I'm a software developer and I'm here to party????
It just hit #3 on iTunes
I think this could be replaced with just "Don't put the young/new person in charge of spicing things up". Hipster is a bit of a charged word, and I think there are plenty that others wouldn't think of as hipsters who would still make this sort of mistake (e.g. recently-graduated frat-bros who used to set up skits that pushed the edge of racism).
Macrohard would be a good name for a fishing goods company
An observation I thought would never find relevance, except now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That sounds like they got caught by a trap laid out by the YesMen. They probably set up an event organizing company as a storefront and waited till someone hired them to pull of that stunt.
Either that, or Monty Python.
bickerdyke
This is simple to explain. One idiot eager to please everyone who does the actual work. One power-tripping boss that everyone is afraid of. And several dozen yes-men/women. QED.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If your name is associated with it you have something to do with it. Or at least partially responsible.
The fact that didn't pay attention isn't an excuse. Their name will be associated with this because it was part of their event.
You know what's immature? The fact that we as a culture seem ok with glorifying violence against people, killing and maiming them, but when you use the word "penis" then OMG! horrible! It's not natural Bullshit.
The world would be a happier, healthier place if we just stood up against this nonsense and admit that sex is fine, fun, and healthy. Seriously, who made that headline? Other than a stupid song with some dumb lyrics, who cares? Sure, it doesn't really get across what MS wants, but a "PR Nightmare"? Give me a break.
It's headlines like these that keep perpetuating the controlling and immature notion that sexuality is a sin, punishable by censure or banishment from society. If MS had used a video of the paperclip smacking around then crushing an apple that oozes blood it wouldn't be appropriate but would it be a "PR Nightmare"?
-
If this is true to microsoft standards, the finnished song which is decent will show up in a bugfix with version 2, 3 years from now.
Microsoft already seems to be doing some kind of damage control because I cannot share this link on facebook. Facebook tells me I'm trying to share a blocked link...
Putting the words MICRO, SOFT and PENIS into the same sentence around raunchy babes probably isn't a good move if your looking for some action.
I haven't seen something like that since the time my company accidentally hired strippers for our Vegas-themed Christmas party.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Only PR.
You are talking about Microsoft, mission complete.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
For Windows XP they picked Madonna's "Ray of Light". I came up with better lyrics than the stock ones.
Gotta admit, though, after maybe 5 years XP became nearly tolerable. For playing games, at least.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
"If your name is associated with it you have something to do with it." -- MickyTheIdiot
This is a parody of Scooter-esque appalling euro-trance, I think it's most amusing. Kudos to MS.
I see you have never been to an Apple store.
I actually had the misfortune to need to go to one in my local mall, when my work Mac Book Pro's hard drive died under warranty.
Two things stuck out:
1) they had easily twice as many blue-shirts as customers, which sure made them look a lot busier than they really were.
2) they had somehow gotten two uniformed, armed police officers to stand as full-time guards in the store. I really appreciate this expenditure of my local tax dollars, knowing that they are vigilantly watching over Apple's goods. Certainly this isn't something they could or shoul dhave handled via private security or something... however do jewelry stores manage?
I'm only offended by how bad the song was. If you watch the video you can hear the crowd's indifference to the whole thing, except for one person sort of laughing at the "joke". The whole thing was pretty lame and ham-handed, which just made the use of vulgarity more notable, like when your dad tells a "dirty" joke to your friends and it's just a bad joke. It makes it way more uncomfortable.
What does that video have to do with a software release in anyway? Minus the fact the words "I'm a software delevoper" appear on the screen. That is offically the most pointless software advirtisment I have ever seen bar none.
Oh please. For just about everything a person or company can do, there is *someone* out there who is going to be offended. I say, screw 'em.
"Mr. Ballmer, you DON'T want to sit down before hearing this".
<shuffling around while all chairs are removed in a 100 meters radius>
Shut the fuck up, you dumb secret bathroom stall cock sucking puritan pile of shit. What the fuck man, the sexual revolution was half an ass bleeding century ago. Give up, grow up, or just die in a fucking fire. Either way, shut the fuck up. You fucking 'christians' need to be destroyed.
I can remember a time when Billy Gates would have laughed when he heard it.
Some departments allow police to be uniformed, off duty, and getting paid to do private security in their spare time. Likewise, some municipalities allow events to pay them to have officers loiter there. So it wasn't necessarily tax dollars.
Good to know, thanks for posting - I was digging around a bit to see if I could find how they would have managed this, and coming up blank.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So the local Microsoft subsidiary or its PR firm didn't understand the parent company is based in the veritable Saudi Arabia of the western world, where even though the prudes, Puritans, and American Taliban have lost the culture war for the most part, they're still staunchly camped out in the business world, under the guise of "political correctness." Instead of invoking Bible verses its "insensitivity" or "sexual harassment" nowadays. New lipstick, same ol' pig.
Now if only they had shown a video of American fighter jets and bombers carpet-bombing civilians, squirting red, white, and blue smoke behind them, all set to "America, Fuck Yeah!", I'm sure it would've been met with raucous cheers and squeals of unmitigated glee from people on this side of the pond.
D. Tyler Cade
It's common practice for off-duty officers to remain in uniform and work extra jobs like funeral processions, security, and managing traffic at large events (e.g. stadiums, mega-churches, etc.). They aren't on the tax payer's dime when they're doing that, so it's doubtful your tax dollars were going to the defense of Apple's retail store.
nt
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
They're definitely not doing it right. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA
2) they had somehow gotten two uniformed, armed police officers to stand as full-time guards in the store. I really appreciate this expenditure of my local tax dollars, knowing that they are vigilantly watching over Apple's goods. Certainly this isn't something they could or shoul dhave handled via private security or something... however do jewelry stores manage?
If you'd pull your head outta your ass for a minute, you'd realize there's such a thing as hiring off-duty officers for security. But that would preempt your conserva-rage, so whatever.
You know, that song has a pretty mean hook. The chorus is probably gonna keep me earwormed for a few hours today. I'M A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER AND I'M DEVELOPING 4 THE REST OF MY LIFE.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Go try to find that video.
Yeah .. sucker is _gone_.
i would think that whoever was supposed to Vet this routine is now on Linked In sorting out his resume (and his Network is now mass redacting him)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Looks like we found the mentally defective person who works for microsoft.
Seriously, mainstream pop music videos can be far more sexist and/or offensive than this... and they're watched by kids, I'm assuming the audience here consisted of adult developers... And the 'drug references'... specifically about *not* taking drugs and just coding instead...
Very silly, mildly amusing, but only worth about a 1/10 on the 'offensiveness' scale..'
CSS
LSD
XML
XTC
The perfect way I get tripped
is 2decrypt
a javascript
Yea, but have you ever seen java script written by someone tripping on LSD? It might as well be encrypted, even if it does work.
file:
Users? Who cares about users? DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!
.
.
.
.
.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like JOKING!
Free Martian Whores!
Is nobody going to comment on the fact that they misspelled "genius"? 1:12 of the video. Homer Simpson couldn't have done it better.
2) they had somehow gotten two uniformed, armed police officers to stand as full-time guards in the store. I really appreciate this expenditure of my local tax dollars, knowing that they are vigilantly watching over Apple's goods. Certainly this isn't something they could or shoul dhave handled via private security or something... however do jewelry stores manage?
If you'd pull your head outta your ass for a minute, you'd realize there's such a thing as hiring off-duty officers for security. But that would preempt your conserva-rage, so whatever.
As you can see above, I thanked someone for pointing out that very thing to me, as I wasn't aware of it. And amazingly, he managed to provide this information by making neither insults nor assumptions about my political affiliations.
He could have proved it was neither micro nor soft by banging a female attendee volunteer right then and there on stage. People would be talking about Microsoft and Azure after that, although probably not in quite the way that Microsoft had intended.
Another possibility is that the store had seen "incidents" recently, and a bit of stepped-up security was in order (more than the mall rent-a-cop could provide). Four years ago, a local grocery store had a couple customer assaults in less than a week, and there was a city cop there from sundown to close for the next week, on the city's dime. I'm a city taxpayer, and I have no problem with that.
Why is everyone mad about sexy women (and, strangely, not upset about sexy men in media), these days? It's as if all of these "third-wave feminists", who give feminists a bad name, decided that anybody being sexy is an acknowledgement that there is kind of standard of attractiveness for the majority of the population.
Oh wait, there is, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Leveraging sex appeal to sell products isn't sexist, it's just a little silly. You're overreacting, most of you.
The Penis joke was silly, but nothing to get your drawstrings in a bunch over.
All geeks would have understood s/s/n/
Replying to own post but the company name was ASKUL. Maybe it means ass + fun in Swedish. Though cul in French means bottom too.. oh well! Just thought it would help when making up domain names and the like.
The NDC Norwedian Developer Conference was NOT organized by Microsoft.
Ok well Apple hired those 2 police officers when they were not on shift. These guys were paid overtime rates to sit there and act as security guards. Lots of clubs and large stores higher off-duty police officers because they know when it comes to somethign going down, they are more experienced, and the store won't be held liable for any over-aggresiveness. My Father in law made a lot of money this way working Off-duty for nightclubs (especially where alcohol is served)
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
And even THAT was offensive, but in a totally different way.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
The old joke: after hearing about the actor Hugh Grant's legal trouble after his involvement with the prostitute Divine, Bill Gates picked her up. Afterwards, he said, "So *that's* why they call you Divine!"
She responded with, "So that's why they call you microsoft".
mark
You have to resort to drastic measures to keep people awake at these things.
Thanks for sharing that. I've always assumed that the city had sent them there at taxpayer expense - and it's usually highly questionable as they're always directing traffic in front of expensive shopping centers or at the high profile private sporting events.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Yes, I learned this the hard way. I once used AC verses John Doe for the End User HowTo doc on filling out a form. It seemed out of the 1000 people who saw it, 2 were offended enough to escalate and demand it be changed.
I explained to them that it was poking fun at the example John Doe filling out the form (cause he was too scared to put down his real name in the request breaking company policy). Also that AC came from before my time (theirs). AND that in this day and age, AC was more neutral than John or Jane D.
For reasons I still do not understand, my explanation only made them angrier. It was a simple find and replace... but ahh whatever, lesson learned, some people have no sense of humor.
That's unlikely.
What blows my mind us that they'd apologize. What's to get offended about? Why do you have to keep bending over and taking it hard from the oversensitive crybabies of the world?
I say fuck anyone that gets obnoxiously upset over song lyrics.
I wasn't going to say it quite so offensively, but I agree
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Raunchy, vulgar, drug references - what's not to like?! This is exactly the stuff my favorite tv shows are based on (except mythbusters)
"The problem with Microsoft is that they simply have no taste.": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgOP_aqqtg
You know how members of the military show genuine respect for some idiot that outranks them?
Because when you salute, you're not saluting the man, you're saluting "the uniform," the office the man holds, not the man. It's kind of a dodge, I'll grant you, but one I think works.
The badge works the same way. I'll follow an officer's instructions in public not because he's a great guy, but because he holds a public office We the People have invested with authority. It's the badge that's important, not the man.
When I was in college, I worked at a very large and successful tourist trap restaurant and bar at a site of great natural beauty. The owner hired two sheriff's deputies for security. In return for hanging out on the weekends and hitting on the waitstaff, the owner provided those two deputies with half of their takehome pay and just a whole lot of booze.
It didn't take long for the corruption to set in. The owner was getting those deputies money, alcohol and sex and sure enough, they very quickly became his personal pet deputies. I saw people get arrested for very little more than "Contempt of Owner," while the DUI patrols that used to hover around the restaraunt mysteriously evaporated.
It's a pretty simple principle. The badge should not be available for rent or sale. Private money should not buy public authority. Doing so is called "Bribery." Our Law Enforcement Officers need to avoid even the appearance of favoritism or bias, and thus should not be taking money from people thay may one day be called upon to testify against or arrest.
If this means we need to pay our LEOs a living wage, so be it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Woosh! We are laughing at the how childish the whole thing was. Only children go around bragging about their penis. No one is actually scandalized.
So the words penis and vagina are now officially "offensive". Right... Next thing you know, the words "urethra" or "medulla oblongata" will land one in jail.
MICRO and SOFT are exactly what i want a vagina to be.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Yes, complete agree here. The dancing was terrible. The lyrics were lame. The one thing it was NOT was raunchy (m-w: obscene, smutty), in the same way that yelling "penis" (or "vagina") is neither explicit nor sexual in every context. Sometimes it just indicates that something is wrong with you. Not to mention the hilarity in the thinking which led someone somewhere to believe that adding "or vagina" made it inclusive, and someone else to approve it!
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20120604&mode=classic
What they hell were they thinking?
Microsoft, love them or loathe them used to have great marketing when Bill Gates was CEO in the 1990s and hired the same PR advertising agencies that Nike and others used. There is just no vision in this post XP era at Microsoft.
http://saveie6.com/
I used to work at an amusement park and we had real police. You can hire them out from the city at an expensive price.
Now I know where all that money goes when I see the price of a mac. I think its good that there are blue shirts abound compared to everyone else who just focuses on cutting cost and having one entry level guy do the work of 3 people etc.
http://saveie6.com/
It looks like they are wearing sweaters and shorts. Scantily clad maybe by Taliban definition. Who is kidding who.
And the lyrics are obviously being used in good humor and fun and not in a vulgar way.
This is what passes for raunchy? They're wearing sweatshirts for fuck's sake.
This kind of bullshit makes it hard for me to take the Slashdot crowd's criticisms against Microsoft seriously.
Wow, I guess a police officer in most European countries would be fired (ab)using his uniform on a private job like that.
The above post is true. It was modded down by a near-dead ball-licker with no reason to live, or a Microsoft troll (which is the same thing).
2) they had somehow gotten two uniformed, armed police officers to stand as full-time guards in the store. I really appreciate this expenditure of my local tax dollars,
While your tax dollars may have paid for the uniform, your tax dollars did not pay for the police officers to stand there in the store. Most likely those were off duty officers who were hired by Apple. This happens all the time.
vagina
You mean a redundant array of inexpensive ones.
Today, I learned what a RAIV is!
Aral Balkan was speaking at the conference and is probably responsible for the odd ‘or vagina’ phrase that’s mentioned.
You can read the details as part of the article he’s written here: http://www.whatwherewhy.me/blog/2012/06/11/the-male-gaze/
Microsoft Retirement Home?
MicroSoft is trying to attract stupid people who won't object to their anti-trade policies such as forcing hardware manufacturers to build machines that won't allow people the freedom to us the operating system they prefer.
Tales of the unexpected ;-) for those who are old enough!
That's my excuse. In reality, I doubt my linguistic ability to sufficiently plumb the depths of the barrel from which that was scraped.
On a scale of "zero" to "bad" ... that doesn't fit.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Am I the only one who thinks the people who put this together knew exactly what they were doing? - tongue firmly in cheek, and a comedy routine that, IMO, sort-of works (not exactly 'comedy gold', but a nice play on the whole geek chic thing that made me chuckle in a couple of places). Alas, and somewhat unsurprisingly, corporate American HQ failed to get the joke.