06.24.09
Press That Covers Microsoft Also Sponsored by Microsoft, Praises Microsoft
Summary: TechFlash’s confession about finances through sponsorship
We routinely remind readers that Microsoft owns a lot of the mainstream press (to a greater or lesser degree). In fact, we gave one example a week ago. With the sour economy, a lot of the pro-Microsoft press goes underground (e.g. [1, 2, 3]) and new media sources are being formed, so it is nice to be able to confirm that they too get corrupted by Microsoft’s money, especially because their main areas of focus include Microsoft.
Bing, Microsoft’s newly rebranded search engine, will have some surprises in store as the presenting sponsor.
The example above comes from TechFlash, so there are no illusions about financial independence when it comes to Todd Bishop. The companies that invest in this publication can expect positive coverage in the future. People would not bite the hand that feeds them. It is the same with Ziff-Davis [1, 2, 3, 4] for example. Money changes everything.
Speaking of Microsoft and sponsorships, the Microsoft crowd keeps pinging/bothering us in Twitter, with banter about freebies. It’s not the first time. They do not like being exposed and they typically handle this with tactless humour which it worse than silence. █
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Yuhong Bao said,
June 25, 2009 at 1:42 am
This reminds me of this article from Coding Horrors on advertising:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000893.html
Needs Sunlight said,
June 25, 2009 at 5:25 am
Even Roy accidently gets caught up in the mess. M$ would rather have people complaining about it’s poor products that even one sentence about the real technologies.
It appears that M$ failed search service has been re-branded as Bling is to try to steal the thunder from Wolfram Alpha, which unling Bling is actually a new way to do things:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Bling is well … just that … bling. Eye candy and marketese lipstick on the failed MS search pig.
David "Lefty" Schlesinger said,
June 25, 2009 at 8:20 am
First, it’s “Bing”, not “Bling”. Second, Wolfram Alpha isn’t a search engine (and is every bit as proprietary as Google and Bing.)
Roy Bixler Reply:
June 25th, 2009 at 9:08 am
I’m betting that was an attempt at humour.
I don’t think that he claimed the Wolfram Alpha was non-proprietary. Do you know of any search engines that aren’t proprietary?