Microsoft Uses Wal-Mart Flog Defense in Wikigate

It's important to understand that it wasn't Microsoft's PR team that did this, but its/a techy. Had an experienced PR been involved, it wouldn't have happened.

Rob Weir shows us the page before the flap. It was anything but biased. Check http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/crocodile-tears.html to see what I mean. If you then read Rick Jeliffe's article about it, you'll see that they had *him* convinced that it was one-sided and defective.

Bruce: You're joking, right?

Here's your homework: put Microsoft ethics PR into Google and search both the web and Google News.

Start here: http://www.kegel.com/corporate_ethics.html
BL

Walt: The most telling thing in that post is the comment that says Rick Jelliffe should be insulted that Microsoft thought he could be bought in that way.

I love the "IBM made us do it" defense. It's even better than the Wal-mart, "a junior person did it without our permission" defense.

no way to spin "we pay to change Wiki entry" into an worthy decision. Their a big outfit and need to expect being hit with a few tomatoes but I'm with you B.L. - Microsoft ought to concentrate on products that people rave about, can't live without.
Are you really Queen Elizabeth? :)

Did you get down into the comments enough to read Doug Mahue's defence. He's at least sticking up for his actions in asking Jelliffe to do the edits and trying to put his reasoning across.

Actually, Wikipedia editors welcomed my involvement and I performed the (4 day) contract over the subsequent few months. Following Wikipedia's rules, I put all my suggested edits in the talk pages, and let editors and so on judge them. Almost all of them were accepted, by the way.

I wish people would bother to actually check up what happened before painting me with this mud. What MS did was pretty much exactly what you say they should have done...get a well-respected geek to present opinions, present them to Wikipedia, and publicize it.

As for me being bought, a large part of my job is writing and preparing seminars; there is a difference between being bought (i.e. changing your opinion) and being hired (i.e. trying to redress balance) to do what tens of thousands of other technical editors do: look through technical details and figure out what is correct.

You should be aware that there are many other open source advocates who see standardization as a big win for opponents of MS. In the same way as the decade-long network protocols trial that ended recently (i.e. the one where the SAMBA people were demanding that the secrets of MS' protocols would be revealed) would have been better handled by get standardized versions of them published, so it is better for us to have a published standard for OOXML (and remember, a standard is not a regulation: it doesn't mean we have to use it for anything, all it means is the information is out there and has been vetted for certain documentation-quality and consistency features.)

Rick - what makes you comment 12 months later on this post?