Microsoft Ferrari furore is a load of old tosh

MICROSOFT IS GETTING a lot of crap lately for sending out notebooks preloaded with Vista to bloggers. While most people out there are calling this everything from spin to bribery, it simply is not, it is how the industry works.

Microsoft may have done some stupid things here, but stupid is not an evil plot.

Before we go on, let me say that I think that Microsoft is perfectly capable of the dirty tricks and behind the scenes evil plots game. One look at SCO and 'whispering' Steve's latest mouthing offs about Linux should tell you it can do this on a grand scale. This time, the unwashed masses are wrong, it isn't a conspiracy, it is a PR person who didn't think things through.

Another disclaimer, I have one of said laptops, an Acer Ferrari 1000, given to me not by Microsoft, but by another company to use and write about. I got it in September last year. Another INQ writer got the same one, with Vista, from MS. You can see this has altered our coverage of MS to be much more favourable, see here and here.

Back to the story. Hardware, sometimes shatteringly expensive, shiny and cool, sometimes a book, is routinely sent to reviewers. A company runs the numbers and determines whether the PR value they may get from the part is worth the expense of buying an item and sending it off. The bigger the site, and the higher the readership, the more exposure it will get them. This is why big and influential sites can write a company and ask for things and you can't. The fact that your entire extended family reads your blog religiously does not help your case much.

When you get the hardware you use it to actively review, colour your opinions about a company, or leave on the shelf to use when you get other parts. They all tend to have one thing in common, there is no way I would have bought any of the parts I have if I had to spend my own money. There is also no way I would have written about them if I did not have one.

I have three high end servers, two high end gaming boxes, a dozen more PCs, and enough parts that I may need a bigger house soon. If I get an R600 in the mail, I can plug it into a 4x4 and a Kentsfield in minutes and try it out. ATI will get press for the card, AMD and Intel will get press for their gaming stuff , and the best man wins, as do readers.

If I did not have the parts here, there would be no review, and ATI would not get any press other than "it is coming out" with dry specs. If you send me a set of SCSI drives, plugging it in to an Athlon 64 3000+ box does little good. Plugging it into the Clovertown or Rev F server is a lot more relevant to the readership and the manufacturers.

If these were not sent to me, there is no way I would rush out and buy a $10,000 server to test a $500 drive. I probably would not test the $500 drive if I had to buy it either. See a pattern?

Moving on to Microsoft, what it did was send a lot of Acer Ferrari 1000 laptops out with Vista on them. I have heard people say that they should have just sent Vista, and while that is a fair comment, there is one catch.

Vista has absurd hardware requirements for an OS, and if you want to run it with all the features turned on, such as Aero Glass, you need a pretty hefty laptop. The market is pretty slim on laptops that will run Aero Glass at speed and still be useable. Intel parts won't cut it until the January driver releases, if then. Nvidia laptop chips are a running joke in terms of power consumption, so that leaves ATI.

With the current DAMMIT/Intel love affair, it is safe to say that an AMD+ATI box is the best bet. The Ferrari 1000 is a spiffy looking laptop that functions fairly well thank you, it was a good choice to make an impact on the people getting it.

When companies send out parts, they will often do it in context, and this is one of those situations. If they sent you a box with Vista in it, and you put it on a laptop with integrated DX7 graphics and 256MB of RAM, you probably would not have a good experience. So the Ferrari was there to ensure you saw things the way Microsoft wanted it to be seen, not to line your pockets.

When companies send out parts, they will often send them out with relevant systems. AMD's 4x4s were shipped not as a set of CPUs but in a system that was similar to the configuration you would buy them in. Intel sent out Clovertowns in a pedestal server with all the trimmings. I have both, but I didn't hear any outcry from the unwashed masses that we were being bribed because they sent more than the CPU. Come to think of it, I didn't hear a peep out of anyone about any site getting these machines.

Here I think Microsoft sent out one of the few machines in existence that you can run Vista on in its full glory. Because of the requirements, it meant a very high end machine, and if that is what it takes, that is what Microsoft sent. Maybe it was a little gratuitous because it went for the Ferrari instead of the vanilla Acer with more or less the same specs, but that is not something to crucify it for.

Did Microsoft make mistakes here? Sure it did. The biggest one was who they sent it to, mostly bloggers. I doubt it was only bloggers though, like I said, the INQ got one, and I am sure other major hardware sites did too. They just didn't care enough to point it out. For any real site, this is such an ordinary occurrence that it wasn't worth a mention.

Microsoft did send them to bloggers who are not accustomed to getting multi-thousand dollar packages at their door on a regular basis. Rather than interpreting this as normal, they immediately thought it was a bribe. This is the one place PR screwed up. OK, a start of the chain of PR screwups.

I have a theory about why it was sent to bloggers though. Mainstream sites already have Vista through MSDN/Technet/whatever, and have the hardware to run it on. Microsoft wanted to get the word out through an astroturfing campaign, and this is a good way to do it. People who would not normally have a copy of Vista now do, and have the best possible experience out of the box. Par for the PR course.

So, it was sent to people unaccustomed to getting such things, without proper explanations, and Microsoft was unprepared for the hugely negative reaction it got. You could almost hear their jaws drop when they realised how it would be taken, and they panicked. I have seen a lot of letters about new hardware, how it should be used and so on, and the MS letters had none of that. It was sheer PR panic in email form.

It wasn't a dirty tricks PR campaign, it was just someone not seeing the big picture and overreacting in all the wrong ways to try and fix it. That is a lesson learned for someone if he or she still has a job.

Overall, I don't see anything wrong with what Microsoft did. No conspiracy, just stupidity, and that is not a crime. Some companies do use hardware as tools to ensure good reviews. You will probably have little problem figuring out the culprits.

Microsoft screwed up here, but it does not deserve the crap that is falling on its heads. If you give the firm grief for the Ferrari notebook SNAFU, you need to do the same for every hardware manufacturer out there, because they are as guilty, even though there's no guilt. Then go look at what the drug companies do for doctors and your eyes will bug out out of your head. µ

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