“Vista is much better than Mac OS X, right? For the enterprise. And how much will it take to get you to write up that thesis? Such was the pitch that arrived in my inbox today from marketing company Studio B., a Great Neck, N.Y., marketing company associated with Microsoft and the Microsoft Press. The firm wondered if I’d like to write some ‘corporate custom content’ for a client,” David Morgenstern reports for ZDNet.
“It’s not too hard to figure out who the [client] is here. The price to sell out the Mac in the enterprise is $15,000. But my guess is that this fee may be negotiable upwards depending on the brand of the author in question,” Morgenstern reports.
“Can it be that the Mac and the iPhone are gaining enough traction in the enterprise to start ringing alarm bells in Redmond? It appears so,” Morgenstern reports.
“This letter reminded me of an unusual happening from earlier in the year. It was the hint of a whisper campaign against Apple in the enterprise,” Morgenstern reports. “This was where a friend of mine — an executive at a technology company who had never owned a Mac and whose company doesn’t support Apple hardware and never will — asked me about something he had heard about Apple: that while Apple products had great design, they were of poor quality.”
“Of course, this claim is nonsense. But suspicious nonsense. Marketing kinda nonsense,” Morgenstern reports. “The best candidate to receive the rumor would be someone who hasn’t used a Mac client machine. I can see how it may spread in in enterprise IT departments or within companies receiving pitches for technology adoptions where switchers are starting to be seen.”
Morgenstern reports, “It appears that rumors couldn’t stop the switcher tide. Now, they are looking for corporate custom content from trusted sources. Believe me, that won’t work either.”
Full article, with text from the email Morgenstern received, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Daily Reader” for the heads up.]
Microsoft’s fear is palpable.
Gotta love Microsoft getting outed on another fake “grassroots” campaign.
Fake letter writers to encourage the DOJ to drop the anti-trust lawsuit against them
Fake art director testimonials (stock photo of an ‘art director’) to get people to switch to PC’s.
Now this blogging bounty.
This company is running on inertia alone.
Now you know why there is so many stupid unfounded reviews of apple products. I told you, those 300 millions didn’t end in 4 microsoft ads…
“Some interesting posts over at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=2415 concerning this story.”
I’m waiting to see the following on the ‘net.
<b>MICROSOFT CEO CAUSES FATAL ROAD CRASH (*)<b>
38 elementary students were killed when their bus crashed in the X River after being driven off the road by a Hummer H2 driven by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. State Patrolmen said Mr. Ballmer tested over the legal limit at a roadside sobriety test. …
Comments:
Must be a slow news day. Nothing better to do than beat up on Microsoft?
(*) This headline and article are pure fiction written to support the rather lame joke that follows about the commentator. While i think Ballmer is an incompetent CEO, i have no reason to believe he is a bad person or that he would ever drive drunk. He could be a teetotaller for all i know.
Damn. Sorry about the broken tag.
Welcome to PR wars. Behind the headlines, this is the type of stuff that goes on. PR and marketing teams are enlisted to sow FUD, launch rumors and whisper campaigns, pay off bloggers and journalists to plant stories based on corporate talking points, and often, file stories under their byline that the journalist or blogger never wrote.
If you don’t think this sort of thing happens, guess again. Much of what you see as business news on TV new is not generated by the network, but instead “reports” are often video press releases developed, produced and paid for by a corporate client of a PR firm. The PR firm then packages and pitches the news release, video news release, article or interview access with a major corporate executive (aided and abetted by the fact that the corporation might be a major advertiser) to get a favorable story planted, or to get their talking points into play.
When you are talking about Microsoft, it’s played on a whole new level. Within Microsoft’s PR department are over 500 full-time employees whose task is to track everything written and said in the media about the company; produce and pitch news releases, articles, briefs, backgrounders and talking points. In addition, the corporate PR team also pitches speaking engagements by Microsoft corporate executives at trade shows and other events, and pitches appearances and interviews with their executives in print, in radio, in podcasts and on television.
In addition, Microsoft also employs 500-1,000 outside PR and marketing professionals with companies like Waggoner-Edstrom Public Relations and other firms. Their job is similar and even more broad in scope. As a third party, these companies are an arm’s length from Microsoft, but act as the company’s PR operatives. They have divisions that focus on pushing the talking points and PR agenda of Microsoft corporate and its various divisions: consumer (games, devices, Windows, Applications and online services), Enterprise and Corporate.
This combined army has cultivated deep relationships with the computer trade media, bloggers, business press (Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, etc.), newspapers, wire services and other news organizations around the world.
The bottom line: when you start seeing a similar pattern of talking points emerge in various news media about Microsoft, or conversely, anti-Apple (Vista good, Apple bad), know that this isn’t an accident.
In recent months, as Apple has continued to win favorable views from the media, from corporate executives, from an entire generation of consumers, and continued to gain market share, this has caused alarms to go off in Redmond. The company has made it clear that it is committing millions of dollars to marketing and advertising. But it’s not just the lame Microsoft “I’m a PC” ad campaign we’re talking about. Instead, Microsoft is no doubt spending millions more on PR and whisper marketing to sow FUD (a classic Microsoft tactic) and to position Microsoft favorably at the cost of its competitors (in this case, Apple).
Examples of this in recent years include:
1. 1990s: Apple is beleagured, Apple is doomed.
2. 2002 – 2006: Security through obscurity.
3. 2008: Apple Tax.
What is fascinating is that Microsoft’s latest ploy has been outed by David Morgenstern. There’s an old adage in PR that you never want to BE the news, but you should only make it. In this case, Microsoft has made itself the news. Bad.
In a latter episode of the Raiders of the Lost Ark series, Indiana Jones, when confronted by an Arab assailant wielding a flourish of swords, reaches for his gun, as he did in the original movie. But this time, instead of simply shooting his assailant, he discovers his gun isn’t there. I think there’s a metaphorical similarity here.
Memo to Steve Baller: your old tricks don’t work any more. But that won’t stop Microsoft from resorting to evil and dubious tactics.
And that, dear friends, is our lesson today in Public Relations. Have a nice day.
P.S. Strap in to your seats and get ready for the FUD attacks in response to Apple’s earnings statements. Microsoft, short sellers, hedge funds and others are already gearing up to use the media and to whisper to Wall Street analysts negative words to push their positions. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
@Viktor,
Sorry. I’m afraid there are so many stupid, unfounded reviews of Apple products (or Microsoft or anyone’s products) because there are so many reviewers who are not knowledgeable about the basics of their self proclaimed fields of expertise.
Do not assume conspiracy where incompetence is a sufficient explanation. I’m sure someone famous said that, or at least someone said it famously.
Now that OpenOffice is a viable alternative to MS Office, and there are many viable browsers to IE, and many viable media players and many viable gaming platforms and many viable mail/calendar solutions and many viable databases and the Cloud is becoming viable for enterprise-type services and Linux is a more viable web server solution and there are more viable virtualisation solutions, etc, etc.
In what area is MS still the most viable solution? Maybe Exchange with its user-lockin. Maybe Visual Studio with its developer-lockin? But even these are starting to look Windows-limited.
The recession (or fear of a recession) will push Open Source software to the foreground whatever the OS, but its open nature means that the MacOS is no longer locked out and the best solution can rise to the top each time.
Grifterus wrote: “Where is Zune Tang? Haven’t heard from Zune Tang for a while!”
Well, the original, Microsoft marketing campaign he and other lemmings were getting paid to post under has now expired. Since the first one (with Zune Tang and others) failed so miserably, we now have to endure the launch of a brand new campaign to take it’s place, which also won’t gain any traction.
Microsoft is so very bad at PR and marketing. It’s pathetic. Hey Ballmer. Why don’t you try harder to improve your products instead of merely copying Apple?
Report:
Microsoft willing to pay Mac enterprise bloggers to sell out Apple
A text-book example of astroturfing.
That is just sad.
Hey MS, why don’t you try competing by making quality products rather than this unethical tripe….
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha!
Really… that was pretty much my immediate response when I read this.
Gimme my $15k and I’ll write whatever you want MS!
@ Mike
“How do they sleep at night?”
They don’t. They sleep in the day and “work” at night.
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Balmer is going to run Microsoft right into the ground.
OooH! Did PC allready sell so many cackes? lol
Maybe i’ll ask M$ for some monney to put a vista add on my website… I would just need some $ to buy a new Mac Pro next spring!
WOW, At least now we can see where that $ 300,000,000 is going.
Cause we know, its not going towards the cost of advertisments.
LOL , Just WOW, LOL.
Just a thought,
en