Microsoft Pays Bloggers to Tout MS Slogan

Stony Stevenson writes "In an effort to inject Microsoft's latest slogan, 'People-ready business', into popular usage (and no doubt raise its Google page rank), Microsoft asked a passel of A List Bloggers to write blurbs on what this meaningless phrase means to them. Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Fred Wilson, Richard MacManus and a handful of others happily agreed to churn out some mush for Microsoft, which it later used in banner ads. What it really meant to these guys was income. Redmond paid the bloggers for every user who clicked through to the PRB microsite. That caused other bloggers, lead by Gawker chief Nick Denton, to rightfully question their ethics. A spitball war has been raging ever since."

Nothing unusual

[Anonymous Coward]

Any blogger that supports their site through ads is making money through a marketing campaign. You can even pay Google to put other peoples' ads on your site for you. What's wrong with that?

Makes you think...

[oskay]

I wonder how much of this thing goes on that we *don't* hear about.

People-ready business

[bky1701]

To me, 'People-ready business' represents a new low in catch-phrase marketing. We all know 'can you hear me now', a stoned man saying 'dude we're getting a Dell', 'works out of the box' and the Vegemite song sucked. But new levels are being reached, requiring of extending the "int catchphrase_rating" to "long int catchphrase_rating". These levels are being reached by the one and only, Microsoft.

For a while now, Microsoft has been looking for a way to make money. Their business has been dying down not due to competition, but due to sheer lack of anything to sell. So comes Vista. With it's color-coded file explorer, OSX ripoff interface and Vista-only-for-no-real-reason DX10, they were sure they were saved.

This was not the case.

The hotcake Vista was predicted to be turned out more to be a segway, and (while ducking from flying chairs) the marketing department had to come up with a way to sell this new steaming turd. Enter 'people-ready business'.

I am not personally sure what this is intended to mean. Are they attempting to sell a business that is ready for people to use? Doesn't Mcdonalds fall into this category? Or is it an attempt to make people ready for a business? If so, what business? Microsoft?

Has Microsoft finally admitted to being the Borg? Is the next tag line, "lower your shields and prepare to be boarded"?

Who knows. This blogger is unsure.

/Waits patently for check

Re:In other news

[Opportunist]

Probably negative ones, yes.

Re:Nothing unusual

[ozmanjusri]

Isn't this what's been happening in most magazines now for years?

Yes, that's why bloggers were initially percieved as a breath of fresh air in an arena dominated by shills.

The honeymoon didn't last long, and now many of the journos who used to tout in the magazines have transferred their skills (and bad habits) to blogs.

Re:Nothing unusual

[pasamio]

But most magazines have the legal requirement to either mark that its an advertisement (ever seen those full page magazine articles with 'advertisement' placed somewhere on the page) or that they derived some benefit from it (e.g. an article a while back from Angus Kidman with the text "Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion" (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/ 04/27/1224215)).

This doesn't have that sort of marking, there in lies the issue. Its not clearly linked with a company (e.g. blogs.microsoft.com) and it is them being paid off by companies. Cash for comment. Actually illegal in Australia (see John Laws on the same subject).

Thats the issue.

Re:Reverse Slashdot effect

[Enderandrew]

Here is the text without links, which it should let me post:

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Recently Microsoft unveiled their new slogan, "People-ready business". They have asked bloggers to write about what exactly this means to them. As someone who has grown up on Microsoft technologies, not only in the home, but in the workplace as well, I feel that I am very qualified to write about what this means to me.

Not everyone is a computer genius, and ever for those with strong technical skills, information technology is ever changing. It is near impossible to keep up, and thusly it is vital to design technologies that are intuitive to the end user. Time shouldn't be wasted on fighting with the technology. The tools should be designed in a way so that users can easily take advantage of them. They should also feature-rich and powerful so that advanced users can maximize productivity. Microsoft's crown jewel in this regard is likely their Office Suite. Not many people may recall, but at one time Microsoft was the underdog in Word Processing and Office software. It had to wrestle control of the market away from such giants as WordPerfect and dBase IV. Microsoft Office has become the de facto standard for how most people work and communicate.

However, being "People-ready" means the tool isn't as important as the people who use them. Our documents and databases, our emails and calendars, it is the data that we create that is so vital to us. In that regard, there has been growing concern over Microsoft's proprietary document standards. When creating a document in one version of Office, can you be assured that a user with another version of Office can open it? How sure are you that you'll be able to open your data 5 years from now, or 10? How useful is the tool, if we end losing access to everything we create with it? Shouldn't our content belong to us? Being "People-ready" means empowering the people to fully control their documents. In that regard, I recommend everyone to look into alternatives like OpenOffice and KOffice, which both utilize the Open Document Format.

Being "People-ready" also means being flexible and far-reaching. When working and communicating with others in a global environment, having open standards allows for people around the globe to connect together, even across different platforms and technologies. Again, technology should be a tool that allows us to collaborate, not intrinsically divides us. End-users don't care about hardware levels, or version-numbers. They just want to be able to connect with other people. If Microsoft were truly dedicated to being "People-ready" their products would focus more on open-standards. Their web-browser would be standards-compliant, so that people can more easily develop web-sites and know that everyone will be able to see and use them the same way. Microsoft would utilize open-standards for applications like Outlook, so they could handle contacts and appointments with anyone regardless of platform. They would open up their instant messaging network, and instead build on an open platform like Jabber so that we can simply to one address for messaging, and bring everyone together under one service and one protocol for the entire world rather than a collection of diverse networks again that divide us.

A while back Microsoft ran a campaign about believing in the people who use their products. The campaign suggested that Microsoft wanted to encourage us to innovate and be successful, when in truth, no major company has done more to stifle the growth and development of other companies. Honest competition is fine in a capitalistic society, but repeatedly Microsoft has been accused, and often been found guilty of anti-trust practices. They have bought out companies, strong-armed vendors into locking out the competition, breaking the law, and operating with hostile intent to destroy other businesses. "People-ready business" is not threating to "fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google".

Re:Surely the Salshdot crowd has some ideas

[jeevesbond]

Actually I'm being blatantly paid-off to tout this shit (literally): The Wipe-Ready Business [wipeready.com]. Is your business wipe-ready?

Unfortunately I can't claim the credit for this masterpeice. :)

Re:Nothing unusual

[PopeRatzo]

No, that's not what happened. If you click through TFA, you'll find they actually lathered up Microsoft's ass pretty good. "People Ready is a way of life, not a practice." was one of the blurbs they wrote.

But they weren't really "A-List" bloggers. "Michael Gaizutis" for example, who wrote the blurb above. I've never heard of him. In fact, I had to read his name closely to make sure it wasn't some gag name like "Michael Hunt" or "Dick Gazinya".

Re:Why?

[nxsty]

I don't know, but it will probably have the side effect that googling for "people" and/or "business" will bring up microsoft.

Re:What happens if you reverse it?

[potpie]

Well that's only if you negate it. If you reverse it, you get Microsoft's real slogan: Business Ready People.

Re:Slashdot, too. Let's take a day off...

[stony3k]

I think the problem is that people can now use the Firehose to influence which stories we see. And since most people don't check the firehose too often, it can be (and maybe is being) influenced by the MS and Apple fans. That to me partly explains why we have been seeing too many of these stories lately. More interesting (and obscure) stories just don't pass muster.

Re:Integrity demands crying foul immediately

[jollyreaper]

How bizarre that there is a "Word of Mouth Marketing Association." Isn't the whole idea of word of mouth advertising that it is not contrived by a marketing group? Reminds me of the Ministry of Truth.

I had a bit of a dystopian idea in a story I wrote. This is one of those futures where there's only so much work to go around, only a fraction of the population has real jobs with disposable income while the rest of society is pretty much on the dole. Because the value of human labor is so cheap, people can now be paid to perform worthless and debasing activities just to earn a little extra over their dole income. Hell, you can already see that today with people paid to stand around outside holding signs for businesses.

Anyway, you know those commercials were two people meet in a checkout line, one of them coughs and the other starts up on this spiel praising the virtues of product x? Imagine that not being a commercial anymore. Millions of independent contractors work as "product evangelists", working hard to track down the people with jobs and create situations where they might provide a personal witness of how wonderful the product is. It's a mixture of stagecraft and spycraft, dressing like and passing for a jobber, speaking the gospel without coming across like just another evangelist.

Sick, scary future, right? Well, that's already happening in trendy hotspots. Marketing scumfucks pay beautiful people to be seen talking about and enjoying new products to start a buzz.

The CIA has robot assassin drones (i.e. Predator), PRAVDA proves more accurate than the New York Times, we've got slug-hunting robots that power themselves by digesting animal flesh, you do more time for copyright violation than murder, Russian spies are getting offed with radioactive poisons, we've got thought-controlled robotic limbs, voice recognition computers, several variations on the original Metaverse concept, the environment is on the verge of collapse, the US is discredited and reviled as a world power, the White House was overtly stolen by thugs who openly laugh at the law, corporations are gathering more power than ever... as much cyberpunk as I read as a kid, I never actually expected to be living in a cyberpunk future. I wanna be a street samurai.