""If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good."

--Bill Gates

Yesterday we mentioned an article written by a man who had received a free trip and special treatment at Redmond, where the spinmeisters kept busy with their brainwash sessions. It would be pointless to repeat yesterday's story and include the same pointers (free gifts in exchange for good publicity), but here is another victim/collaborator of this Brainwash Machine.

Why doesn't Microsoft just hand over $1500 for a trip, restaurants, hotels and the like, possibly then saying to journalists "write something nice" (like H-P was caught saying to journalists last year)?

Anyway, here is second incident which is spotted.

We landed directly at the Seattle-Tacoma airport to attend a press briefing by software giant Microsoft, in the nearby cities of Kirkland and Redmond.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I'd like to think that Microsoft is going out of its way to reach out to technology journalists from the far corners of the world, to argue its case in what has become a very contentious issue in the IT industry.

[...]

The Philippines is one of the countries that voted "no", which partly explains why we were invited to attend the press briefing.

By the end of the article, you can clearly see the effect of the brainwash. Too. Much. Kool-Aid. You will find more information and pointers about OOXML in the Philippines here (mind the cross-references too). We have known about this media blitz for quite some time. Yesterday, even Andy Updegrove expressed his concerns. At the very top of a a prominent page he added a sticky which states:

What happened at the OOXML Press Briefing? Last week, Microsoft flew press representatives in to Redmond from around the world (and particularly from those countries, like Australia and the Phillipines) that had voted against OOXML in last summer's ISO/IEC JTC1 Fast Track vote, for a press briefing. At the briefing, they heard Microsoft representatives such as Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli make the pitch for OOXML, as well as Burton Group research director Peter O'Kelly. The articles that those journalists wrote are beginning to pop up, and excerpts from four appear below. The first notes that Microsoft has also been holding four conference calls a week for National Body representatives, while the last notes that journalists from Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S. were in attendance.

Hasan at Open Malaysia blogs about the latest paper (PDF-formatted) from the ODF Alliance, which does not invite journalists over for a week of 'chats'.

As seen from the ODF Alliance document just released called "Ecma's Proposed Disposition of Comments on OOXML: How we got here; What is missing; Why you should vote No," there are at least 8 reasons why Ecma's proposed "dispositions" or handling of the NB comments are not satisfactory:

A. What is Missing? Time. Legitimate defects acknowledged by Ecma, why rush?

B. What is Missing? Harmonization. Why not move toward one standard?

[...]

At the time of writing, the article from Australia which we mentioned yesterday (published by a journalist that went to Redmond) has found its way into ZDNet and CNET also. This means that people outside Australia will get exposed to the same type of brainwash, which propagated from the spinmeisters at Redmond. It's just the nature of the funnel. Rinse and repeat. ⬆

Image from Wikimedia