Microsoft Bribing Bloggers? Heavens to Murgatroyd!

Newsflash: Uproar in the blogosphere over Microsoft tactics.

Seems that the good folks at Redmond had an idea. What about sending Acer Ferrari laptops to some of the bloggers on The Hive? For those of you who might not know, The Hive is a web community more or less dedicated to talking about Microsoft products and technologies. Microsoft provides the servers, web access and some of the content and the community does the rest. Anyway, the selected bloggers can take the final version of Vista out for a test drive on some decent hardware and then tell the world what they think about it. Afterward, they can do whatever they want with the laptops: keep ‘em, hold a give-away contest, or send ‘em back. If you think of the cost in terms of a single 30-second spot during the Super Bowl, it’s negligible, and the target audience is the people who are most likely to want to know more about Vista anyway.

Sounds like a great marketing idea, doesn’t it? Microsoft is pretty confident that Vista is going to meet most of the hype, so they’re expecting that they will get good (or at least neutral) reviews. And for those few reviewers who might have major complaints, well, it’s something that Microsoft might be able to fix in SP1. After all, the general rule for a sizable chunk of the business environments is to not deploy a new Microsoft OS until SP1 is out. But, no! Sending laptops to bloggers sounds too much like bribery for some folks.

With a few caveats, I’m not one of them and I don’t see much of a problem. If there is a problem, it’s one of perception.

Bloggers are not journalists as we typically think of them. I do not mean to imply that they don’t report news because in many cases they do, nor do I believe that their opinions are not their opinions or are invalid simply because I might disagree. But journalists are supposed to operate within certain ethical boundaries. If they stray too far from those boundaries, they will find themselves looking for new employment, probably in a new career field. Some do stray, as evidenced by a few notable scandals over the past couple or three years, but the vast majority do not. Bloggers, however, are not bound by those ethics. Within certain legal considerations (copyright and libel, for example), they can write pretty much whatever they want about whoever or whatever they choose.

So what’s the big deal about sending out a few laptops? Perception, mostly. If a blogger who has received a laptop from Microsoft (these are $2000+ machines, by the way) writes a glowing review of Vista, was it because Vista is actually that good or because they got a freebie laptop out of the deal? How about if the blogger writes a glowing review of Vista on their own machine and with their own copy of the OS? That last is strictly hypothetical as Vista has not been released for public consumption yet. And how are you, the reader, supposed to be able to tell the difference unless the blogger tells you where he/she is coming from?

From Microsoft’s point of view, the issue is pretty simple. They want people to write about Vista. But Vista’s hardware requirements are pretty hefty if you want to get the full Vista experience. So to make sure that the reviewer gets the full experience, they are willing to provide the appropriate hardware along with the OS. If you go down and look at my comments on the Beta 2 build of Vista, you’ll note that I couldn’t get the Aero Glass effects because my laptop’s graphics card was not up to snuff. But I also told you where I got the OS and that it was a Beta release so you would know the basis of my comments. It seems to me that if Microsoft wants people to write good reviews of their new OS, then it would be in their best interest to make sure that the reviewer can get the full experience of the OS without forking out a wad of cash to upgrade their current system or buying a new one. Note that professional reviewers (like “PC World,” “PC Magazine,” “Comuter Shopper,” and the like) keep their test machines up to date so that they are able to evaluate the full potential of a piece of hardware or software. Bloggers probably don’t have the budget to be able to do that. So is it bribery or making sure that a reviewer can actually see what the OS can do?

And even looking at it in the worst possible light, is it really bribery? Although I’m sure there are some people out there who will switch to a new OS simply because their favorite magazine or blogger said it was way cool, most of us will switch to Vista for a few very concrete reasons: it does something that we want/need to do and can’t in our current OS, it will come preloaded on a new machine, or we’ll upgrade just for the sake of running the latest and greatest. Reviewers have virtually zero influence with people who are going to switch for the first two reasons and people who are going to switch for the third are going to do it anyway. The only things that a review can influence in that regard are whether the switch takes place sooner rather than later and, perhaps, the version that the consumer decides upon.

Microsoft, I’m sure, is hoping for “sooner” (first quarter earnings and all that), but “later” is still money in the bank. If my understanding of Microsoft’s licensing terms to manufacturers is correct, you won’t be able to buy a box with XP on it after January 2008, so “later” is not that much later. As for the version, anyone want to take bets on the sales of ”Ultimate” versus “Home Basic” and “Home Premium”? Speaking from the gaming perspective (which is probably the better reason for going with “Ultimate”), there is currently only one graphics card out there that is built for DirectX 10 (the GeForce 8800 from nVidia, though I’m sure that ATI won’t be too far behind) and zero games that can actually take advantage of it. Even “Halo 2,” which is being tailored specifically for Vista and is not supposed to run on XP, is sticking with DirectX 9 so that players will not have to fork out $500-$700 for a new graphics card to play it.

So let’s see… If people are going to switch OSs because they need or want some new functionality, a reviewer isn’t going have much of an impact on the decision; the OS either does what they want/need or it doesn’t. If people are going to buy a new computer that comes with the new OS, a reviewer isn’t going to have much of an impact on the decision because the computer manufacturers are going to make that decision for the consumer. So that only leaves those who are going to voluntarily switch OSs either through a clean install or an upgrade of their existing OS (assuming, of course, that their hardware can handle it). And the odds are very good that these folks are going to do it anyway.

Frankly, I don’t see a major problem here. This is not a case of “here’s a new car, now say something good about it and you can keep it.” This appears to me as a case of “here’s a new OS and some hardware that will let you see what it can do. Kick the tires, take it out for a spin, and tell us what you think about it. And you can do whatever you want with the hardware when you’re done.” As for the ethics of doing it, I still don’t see a problem. I cannot count the copies of software that I have received from various vendors using a “try it; you’ll like it” approach. So it’s not like this is some new tactic fresh from the “dirty tricks” department at Redmond. The only difference that I see is that in this case the vendor made sure that the hardware was up to spec.

Get a grip, people.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 31 December 2006 at 14:21 and is filed under News and Politics, Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.