Astroturf

Rick Segal is an overt on-line Microsoft representative who is quite active on CompuServe. If you signed onto Will Zachmann's Canopus forum about this time last year, you would have seen him there resolutely trying to improve Microsoft's image. Today Rick is in self-imposed exile from Canopus following an extremely embarrassing episode which has become known as 'The Barkto Incident.'

"According to the documents, local PR agencies are scheduled to begin submitting opinion pieces to the media next week, followed in the coming months by waves of other materials, including glowing accounts from Microsoft partners, consumer surveys and studies designed to show the company's impact on each region's economy. Letters to the editor are to be solicited from regional business leaders. Opinion pieces are to be written by freelance writers and perhaps a 'national economist, 'according to one document. The writers' fees would be 'billed to Microsoft as an out-of-pocket expense.'

As an independent Microsoft Windows developer having no knowledge of Edelman Public Relations' program to manufacture a grassroots campaign in support of Microsoft, I want to express my heartfelt and unaffiliated concern over the current effort by the government to stifle innovation in software design. Let me ask your readers and influential legislators this question: Do you really want to interfere with Microsoft's innovation?

A Microsoft spokeswoman denied allegations Thursday afternoon that the company is encouraging its employees to lie in public forums.

A message posted to a discussion forum on computer-trade site ZDNet and purporting to be from a former employee, accuses the company of urging employees to post fake comments supporting the company's side in the ongoing Microsoft antitrust trial.

Rodney Rotifer - Subject: A Smoking Gun ( Jan 1, 2000, 00:28:35 ) 
This is definately a smoking gun, folks.

I have happened to watch this page periodically. And it was consistantly exactly the
opposite the last time I looked, as it has been for at least the last year.

A poll under the headline "Most Deem Microsoft Lawsuit Bad Use of Tax Dollars", conducted by Zogby and conducted for Americans for Technology Leadership.

Fishier still, all but a handful of the messages posted Thursday on the California attorney general's site (http://caag.state.ca.us) are not from California at all.

Only 19 of 100 postings by midday listed a California city in the mandatory hometown field, including one from ``Los Angelese,'' which only raises suspicion in my mind.

By Friday afternoon, Linux was the leader of the pack and appeared to be heading victoriously across the finish line when a sudden surge of 50,000 votes catapulted Microsoft's Windows 2000/NT well into the lead.

Strange goings on in an online operating system poll run by Microsoft partner MSNBC have raised the ire of Linux Today, which has questioned the strange way in which Win2k/ME surged into the top slot on Saturday, with a surprise 50,000 votes in favour, or thereabouts. As Kevin Reichard says in an email to MSNBC, "It strains creduility that 50,000 votes were tallied SOLELY for Microsoft 2000/ME on a Saturday morning."

Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly.

The pleas, along with about 400 others from Utah citizens, are part of a carefully orchestrated nationwide campaign to create the impression of a surging grass-roots movement. But it may be backfiring.

The targets of the campaign, attorneys general of some of the 18 states that have joined the Justice Department in suing Microsoft, have figured out the campaign's origins, and they're fuming.

The campaign, orchestrated by a group partly funded by Microsoft, goes to great lengths so that the letters appear to be spontaneous expressions from ordinary citizens. Letters sent in the last month are printed on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces--details that distinguish those efforts from common lobbying tactics that go on in politics every day. Experts said there's little precedent for such an effort supported by a company defending itself against government accusations of illegal behavior.

The studies were, in fact, performed by well-known, independent research firms such as IDC, Giga Research and Meta Group. But the reports themselves tell the rest of the story: They were conducted "at the request of Microsoft," "commissioned by Microsoft" or "prepared under contract from Microsoft."

Microsoft, in other words, paid for the studies to be done.

Some analysts say that doesn't meet the definition of "independent." Microsoft says it does. But no matter the outcome of the semantic debate, the situation is drawing new attention to the company's controversial practice of funding and publicizing research to support its competitive claims.

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