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Microsoft Supported by Dead People

Posted by tadelste on · 4 comments
sbergman; By Thor Olavsrud 		Mail this story
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This article was pointed to by a prestigious member of the Lxer community in a post. It's really worth having its own article space. For your information, the post read: Just a reminder of who CAGW really is. (click "Read more" for a snapshot). Warning: laughing so hard that your ribs ache could be hazardous to your health.

Apparently the dead are fed up with the government's antitrust case against Microsoft Corp. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times Thursday morning, letters purportedly written by at least two dead people have made their way onto the desk of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. The letters asked Shurtleff to go easy on the company.



According to the article, the letters, along with those of 400 Utah citizens, are part of a nationwide "grassroots" campaign orchestrated by pro-Microsoft groups Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL) and Citizens Against Government Waste. The groups receive some funding from Microsoft but won't disclose how much.



The Times reported that the ATL calls citizens and says it is conducting a poll about the Microsoft case. Respondents who say they support the company are then sent individually written letters on personalized stationary, with varying wording, color and typeface, along with hand stamped, pre-addressed envelopes. The envelopes are addressed to their state attorney generals, President Bush and their Congressional representatives.

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Comments (4)

At the time, Microsoft were 0.5% dead...

AnonymousCoward ·
...0.25% from another dimension (in which Tucson, Utah exists), and some non-disclosed proportion "not at home". I wonder what the statistics are like four years later?

Interestingly enough, their email provider (LunarPages) only offers Linux hosting, although the SMTP server doesn't identify itself in its banner (except that it's not anything MS-Exchange would send). Their web host (Convio) claims to be Apache, and there's not a Microsoft badge in sight.

It seems more than slightly ironic to see a site plastered with anti-pork-barrelling messages supporting what is in essence a pork barrel.
tadelste Story submitter ·
AC: This story struck my funny bone. I laughed for hours off and on about it. But this is one one of many. The term astroturfers comes from the effort Gates made to make it look like he had a grass roots effort to support Microsoft. When the LA Times discovered Gates paid everyone to show up like 1960's anti-war protesters, he became a laughing stock.

Now, he mostly pays lobbyists, politicians and funds NGO's and non-profits. What a hoot!

My own take, point by point

AnonymousCoward ·
My own take (please suggest corrections and additions either directly or on LXer): http://leonbrooks.blogspot.com/2005/09/citizens-augmenting-g...

Real irony here

PaulFerris ·
This is over 4 years old. At roughly the time this article was posted I had just finished blowing the whistle on LinuxToday.com -- a web site owned by internet.com (the company that is now Jupiter Media) -- the company that published this article, in other words.

It was an "interesting" time, in many ways. I can tell you that the phony grass-roots thing is real, that as a journalist, someone at Wag-Ed (Microsofts' PR firm) was calling me on a regular basis -- until I was let go. That I was not alone in having this kind of special treatment.

Regardless, we'd be fools to think that this sort of bogus lobbying is not in full swing even now. It's part of a broader bag of dirty tricks that large companies (not just microsoft) practice to try and get the game tilted in their favor.

The recent Mini-Microsoft blogging illustrates, however, that their problems likely run far deeper than any amount of cosmetic surgery is going to fix.

--FeriCyde

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