Why bash Microsoft and not Nokia?

The difference between Microsoft and Nokia is simple: Microsoft is an unethical company full of unethical people (with a couple of exceptions), like SCO. Nokia isn’t.

When selling a product that requires other products to function, you do not want the support products failings to show. Thus if you are going to promote software, you want a computer that will not only handle the software, but do it well.

Persoannly, I still think that MS giving away laptops to bloggers is OK and it is up to the blogger to disclose (which he should), then the reader can judge for himself what value the evaluation has.

Guy

Wow, talk about perception vs reality. “Microsoft is an unethical company full of unethical people” last time I looked Microsoft was a multinational organization that employed a cross section of people across all walks of life just like any other organization of its size. Some are good, some are bad, most of us just trying top work hard to make a living for our families. Our founder has set up a charitable organization that is amongst the most giving in the world and as a company Microsoft is also one of the most charitable. Yet it is staffed full of unethical people?
Well before I resume my unethical work duties I just want to say that if any of those receiving such units feel some how tainted I would be happy to put the tainted hardware to good use here and replace my current underpowered work laptop.

Q : “Why bash Microsoft and not Nokia?”
A : Pageviews and RSS subscriptions

I don’t think either one of them did anything wrong. They are setting themselves up for a review whether good or bad. Some bloggers probably won’t even review some products once they start receiving free stuff regularly.

As long as a disclosure is made, I am all for it.

Does the free Nokia cell phone come with free service or does the user have to use their existing service, or buy a service that supports the Nokia device? For example, that N93 doesn’t work with Verizon.

Now, if Nokia is also comping the cell phone service, then that rises to the level of what Microsoft did.

Scoble, can’t you see the difference. If MS dropped free copies of Vista into bloggers laps and said “Go ahead and install it, here’s the PID. Let everyone know how it goes and what you think” Then I think people would have less of a problem with it.

As is stands MS are letting bloggers bypass the experience many people will be asked to undergo. Either buy the product and install it on their existing hardware hoping to hell it will work—along with undergoing the loooooong and painful process of installing the OS; or figure out which PC or laptop they will need to buy to give them the best Vista experience. Microsoft is stacking the deck in their favor by giving bloggers a properly decked out and configured platform in which to run Vista. Whatever experience these bloggers have will not reflect most normal people.

LayZ : That’s lame.

Whatever a company does it can never make the out of the box experience same for a reviewer and a user. For one, the reviewer is not going to depend on the product and won’t be using it for critical functions. That makes a lot of difference.

Besides, what you are mentioning is the install process. The OS can still be reviewed excluding the installation.

Let’s say Microsoft sent out the software in a media with PID. Here are some blog headlines for you

1) “Arrogant Microsoft expects bloggers to spend hours installing VISTA”

2) “Super-rich Microsoft can’t afford a laptop for reviewers”

3) “Microsoft doesn’t get blogging : Thinks bloggers are extension of their test team”

Seriously, it’s not a question of ‘What’. It’s a question of ‘Who?’. Microsoft gave out free Vista licenses to some beta testers. What was the blog coverage on that?

“It’s because some folks get that free crap doesn’t make you have or lose your personal ethics?…

…Ethics that can be changed by free crap weren’t there in the first place.” -John Welch

Yeah, lots of rules and actions that are meant to be for ethical matters rarely improve ethics. They tend to only address what may appear to be a corrupting influence, and not actual corruption.

A book about this (although more from a governmental perspective) even suggests that so much of what passes for ethics enforcement discourages ethical behavior. That book is The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society by Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds. Haven’t read it yet, but I’ve read Reynolds talk about this topic on his blog quite a bit, and find what he has to say quite illuminating.

Actually, I don’t have a huge problem with this whole laptop issue, but I have a couple of observations: First, MS might have picked a less ostentatious “loaner” than an Acer Ferrari. That’s not so much an ethical issue as a perceptual one.

Secondly, any ethical blogger who gets one of these puppies needs to disclose the gift PROMINENTLY on his or her blog.

Thirdly, bloggers aren’t really journalists, and few of them try to even make the claim anymore. Professional journalists have stronger ethical codes in this area, and that is appropriate. CNET routinely returns “review” product, and does not accept unsolicited gifts.

That also means that I’m probably going to give more weight to CNET’s formal review of Vista than I might to a blogger’s account of his/her own personal experience with the product.

The only problem I have with my Nokia is the lack luster battery life and why do I have to go to the calendar to find out the darn date!!

blogger@wordpress

Despite your lack of WordPress blog link, your point about difficulty installing Vista could lead to certain headlines is a good one.

However, I recently interacted with the mainstream media on two articles where I felt the headline was not in sync with the articles.

The answer in both cases? The editor and not the writer picked the headline! This is a problem as the editor can sometimes hype controversy when an article is just analyzing a complex situation fully to let the reader make a decision or they are making a lowest common denominator headline.

I think the disclosure issue is overplayed. Every time you see AOL/Time Warner entity write about Google you don’t usually see a statement about the % ownership. This may in fact played a role in not formally naming the Youtube guys person of the year btw. People who take the time to know influences that will draw their own conclusions about any precieved bias. Shouting it out too boldly just looks silly to me when I see it.

I’d argue that there’s a big difference between a free cell phone that retails for hundreds of dollars and a laptop that retails for many thousands. Obviously, disclosure is mandatory in both situations, but I think part of the objection here was the value of the gift and not the fact that a gift was given.

Also, it’s Microsoft and everyone wants to criticize them for something…

Well, well, well…. ethics and Microsoft vs Nokia providing “hardware” with “software”. What a moral dilemma!

Those of you who are saying there is this huge difference don’t know cellphone technology (or are ignoring the facts). Both a cellphone along with the laptop have software installed in order to function. While Microsoft may have been soliciting bloggers responses to the software portion of the gift, and Nokia was soliciting bloggers responses to the hardware portion of the gift, they both provided essentially the same stuff to the bloggers i.e. that which was required by each to get an even-across-the-board review. I’m not sure Vista would/will perform the same way across all computer hardware configurations, so providing the laptop was a way of ensuring that all reviewers were reviewing the exact same thing.

I agree with Scoble that the key here is that disclosure is made by those reviewers that their products were provided by the “mother ship”. From there, it’s up to the reader of said review to take the review’s pros and cons with whatever faith they have in that person.

JMO

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Strategic techniques are the base structure of the major technical tycoons, they always tend to give in more in order to get the best out of it.

@31. “Microsoft gave out free Vista licenses to some beta testers. What was the blog coverage on that?” Are you seriously asking that question?

There was plenty of blog coverage on that. Read Paul Thurott’s site at all? Seems to me Microsoft was trying to overcome the reviews some of the more vocal and honest beta testers were given Vista by given bloggers a pristine experience with it. That was my point.

@38 : There was some coverage on that. But not the amount it deserved.

The blogosphere reaction would have been much much worse had Microsoft just sent the media and expected bloggers to install it on a PC or Laptop. Not long ago a team from Firefox was invited to redmond to test compatibility with Vista. The reaction at best for that was cynical. Same when the IE team sent a cake over to firefox.

The *tech* blogger community is made up of a bunch of tech geeks, and it’s “cool” among that set to hate Microsoft like they’re the modern version of IG Farben. That’s how deluded these haters are.

Some fool above said that Microsoft is full of unethical people and another talked of years of “bad behavior”. What are you talking about? Oh, that’s right, the bundled a browser in an OS. That violates all 10 Commandements I guess (actually, it violates none of them). The “bad behaviour” you guys speak of wasn’t all that bad (it was normal biz practice, but MS was declared to have a monopoly at the time, after that fact, that got them in trouble), and happened 10 years ago! Get over it!!

Meanwhile, Apple has a stock option scandal, uses sweatshops to make iPods, and has been rated as the worst polluter of high-tech companies. They also killed off the Mac clone market, a more blatant abuse of monopoly power (as the sole provider of the Mac OS hardware specs and license) than Microsoft ever committed. Yet the same losers that hate MS for minor transgressions that happened 10 years ago, look a blind eye at Apple’s recent, and indeed long history, of “bad behavior” (threatening to sue bloggers, anyone?) and worship Apple and Jobs like he’s the Second Coming.

The hypocrisy is palpable.

@John C Welch

“Ethics that can be changed by free crap weren’t there in the first place.”

Agreed…

“Microsoft could give me a new red laptop every day for a year, I’d still not like Vista for the same reasons I currently don’t.”

Right. Have you ever used Windows Vista beyond a “look over someone’s shoulders”? I mean, like a couple of weeks? I don’t think so. I visited your blog just now and there are lotsof affiliate links to Apple products, so obviously you have a biased view on the issue.

Just like everyone else does…

Oh, I forgot one of Apple’s most recent “sins” that they get a total pass on, and it involved their move to intel.

Metrowerks Codewarrior owned the Mac IDE market for years. All the big players (MS, Adobe, etc) used them rather than Apple’s offerings (MPW, ProjectBuilder, XCode). But with the move to intel, Apple made it a *requirement* that a developer use their XCode IDE in order to create universal binaries (apps able to run both on PPC and Intel Macs). Now, Codewarrior already had PPC and Intel compilers; all they needed to make universal binaries was the information from Apple on how to package PPC and Intel code into one package that OSX would understand. Apple withheld that info, thus forcing all devs to move to XCode. Codewarrior essentially went out of business shortly thereafter.

Now, imagine if Microsoft made it a requirement that only Visual Studio could be used to make Vista apps. The bloggers and tech community would be all over them like white on rice. Apple does that exact thing, forces a company that had dominated them for years out of business, and that same hypocritical tech community raises nary an eyebrow.

“Why bash Microsoft and not Nokia?”

Simply because Nokia doesn’t compete with Apple and Linux.

I am part of the Nokia Blogger Review program and must say that the key to this blog review program working is the honesty of the blogger. I always mention in my blog posts about the getting these Nokia phones via this program. I also give an honest review about its abilities in the context of the topic of my blog. My current blog is about Mobile Phone Podcast Listening and the use of Melodeo Mobilcast to do it. In my blog I talk about many types of cool phones that enable podcast listening.

I also think that this program is very smart for Nokia to do. I know that these cool Nokia N-series phones get a lot of attention when I use them in public. I am in the mobile media business and thus these phones get shared a lot in the office and Mobilcast gets tested on these devices.

My teen age kids also use them sometimes and share them with their friends. The benefits of doing this program are huge for Nokia.

I don’t think any company should be bashed for doing one of these programs with key influencers. I believe that most of these key influencers are honest people that disclose. I am currently using the N80 phone and it is a small cool phone, but am dying to get the N95 as that sounds like it could be a dream smartphone with a quad-band, wifi, 3G UMTS/HSDPA and 5 megapixel camera. It is only missing an internal hard-drive like the N91.

Rob Greenlee
http://mobilcasting.blogspot.com

Nokia makes cellphones.

Microsoft does not make laptops.

Stanley, Metrowerks gave up on CodeWarrior for OS X.

Metrowerks focused on embedded platforms and made it quite obvious to everyone, just like how Microsoft’s apathy towards IE for the Mac spawned Safari it resulted in the creation of Project Builder/XCode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770

Nokia promotes Linux and Open Source/GPL code use in commercial products.

When you go to circuit city, you don’t HAVE to buy a Nokia phone. Nobody is forcing you to. You see the difference now?

Being sent products to try and test is what companies have always done. As on the post about the laptops. I see no difference in journalists who write book reviews getting the book for free as people who know about technoloy getting new gadgets for free. Surely if you really know what you’re talking baout even if a product is free, if it is for want of a better word, “crap” you would write something along the lines of – ‘its a good job they’re giving it away as they wont sell many of them.’