“It seems that Microsoft and AMD have partnered to hand out some nice Christmas presents to select bloggers. Microsoft has reportedly sent out new AMD-equipped Acer laptops in an effort to get prominent bloggers using Microsoft’s new Vista operating system,” Michael Calore blogs for Wired.
Calore writes, “If Microsoft were to give away copies of Vista that would make sense and probably raise no eyebrows at all, but giving away a whole laptop understandably strikes some as little more than bribery… Dan Warne a journalist at APCmag left a comment at the site linked above in which he points out:”
It’s bizarre for one of the world’s largest PR companies, Edelman, to think it could get away with this. Perhaps they don’t know bloggers as well as they thought they did… now that some of the bloggers have disclosed the receipt of the gift, the public knows. Whatever the subtleties of the offer were, it comes across as nothing more than a bribe, and that is a very bad look for Microsoft.
Calore writes, “As Warne says, now that the word is out, expect the negative publicity to be every bit as shrill as the positive which means Microsoft’s PR move may well end up backfiring.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: On which planet are OS-limited Acer laptops festooned with Ferrari logos (hello, 1980’s) running Windows Vista considered “nice Christmas presents?” For the record, we did not receive a free Acer laptop with Windows Vista from Microsoft. Go figure. If we had, we’d have sold it on eBay to some random sucker from the planet Delusional and used the money for a new OS-unlimited MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Tiger.
By the way, if Apple ever sends any bloggers gift MacBooks running Mac OS X Leopard, we’ll let you know and call Apple out for attempted bribery, too. Not sure if we’d be able to force ourselves to send it back if we got one, though. 
Okay, so who’s surprised that Microsoft is seemingly resorting to bribery? And how effective can bribery be when the bribe is the reason for the bribe in the first place?
Oh, look, honey, I got an ugly-ass Acer laptop with a car company logo stuck on it that runs a badly-faked, upside-down and backwards Mac OS X skin atop the same old same old rickety Windows foundation. Joy. Perhaps I’ll blog nice things about it? Are Microsoft’s PR flacks nuts?
Related article:
Bill Gates confronted by glowing Apple logos as every single blogger at meeting uses Macs – December 15, 2006
