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Yes, it's a fact.
05.02.09
Video from Waggener Edstrom Explains Perception Management at Microsoft
Microsoft employs self-appointed experts to study your perceptions and modify
them
Summary: Waggener Edstrom’s lack of ethics - take II; a look at a current
real-world example
IN OUR previous post about Waggener Edstrom* we showed that it had become an
integral part of Microsoft Corporation, for which is also lobbies in a variety
of well-documented ways [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. This includes
anti-Linux actions.
One issue that we explored before is this set of Microsoft guidelines for
controlling coverage about the company and its products. Whereas Microsoft’s
documents are confidential, Waggener Edstrom turns out to be talking about
what it does a little more openly. It’s promoting itself using its unethical
methods that it also patents (see the “Our IP” section). That first patent
which was mentioned earlier today is a universal translator, but there is a
lot more. “Some of their other ones are [...] strange scanning tools to [...]
guide the direction of your development,” claims oiaohm. “It’s really strange
to depend on a machine to tell you if your marketing is working. It’s even
more strange to attempt to use a machine to tell you if you are the market
leader or not,” he adds.
“A short while later it received an unexpected phone call from Microsoft and
some abuse which ultimately led to the review being removed.”Going back to
that video, “it covers all the methods you have been seeing,” oiaohm told me.
According to his interpretation, the “idea [of] throwing more resources and
shills/astro turfers at the problem is documented graphically in that video
(instead of fixing problems that caused the bad PR in the first place). The
information is around publicly to see Microsoft’s tactics.”
As a new example of this, see the following post from last week. A small
business received 1,000 times the usual traffic on its Web site when it had
published a negative review of Microsoft’s Surface. A short while later it
received an unexpected phone call from Microsoft and some abuse which
ultimately led to the review being removed. Could Waggener Edstrom have sent
an alert regarding this blogger? After all, that’s just what they do at
Waggener Edstrom.
The post was ‘updated’ (emptied), comments were closed, and the latest separate
update — to quote what Twitter wrote — may indicate the following:
There is nothing gentle about that contact. If you are so “Microsofty” that
you would even consider a $13,000 novelty, Microsoft is your oxygen. They go
on to explain the hate mail they got.
5pm today that discussion had become so chock full of “web-muck” (the
online equivalent of the telephone game, where the original message gets lost
in the transmission) that it was becoming a huge distraction. … the tireless
Apple vs. PC debate … impassioned souls who accused me of being everything
from a “Microsoft Apologist” to “M$ fanboy” to a “complete idiot”
This is typical troll juice and crap flood that comes from Microsoft
astroturfers. Microsoft and friends will smear this person to protect what’s
left of their own reputations. Had this person worked for Microsoft or a
Microsoft partner, they would have been fired. Comments to the apology posts
are now moderated and I doubt any will see the light of day.
Indeed, not a single one has appeared since then. It has been a week. █
“Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make
the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of
the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on those companies
and individuals that show a genetic weakness for competitors’ technologies, to
make the industry increasingly resistant to such unhealthy strains, over
time.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
_____
* The core is Melissa Waggener and Pam Edstrom, who are based in Bellevue,
Washington just like a lot of Microsoft.
http://boycottnovell.com/2009/05/02/perception-management-at-microsoft/
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