Tag: Microsoft

Advertiser-driven stupidity at CNET

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Microsoft and companies whose products run its software are important ad buyers at CNET. It is hard not to think about that when I see a headline on one of CNET’s blogs that reads:

“Get over it already. Microsoft is not the Anti-Christ.”

Well, first of all, I don’t know who’s saying that. But informed people are saying that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist with a long history of anti-competitive practices, livid hostility to open source software, an embarrassingly lame portable media player, and a disastrously bad new operating system whose horror stories have deterred me (a Microsoft DOS/Windows user since the 1980s) from wanting to buy another Windows machine when I upgrade.

But why focus on that? Why not attack a straw man who proclaims Microsoft to be an apocalyptic danger to the world, or whatever?

Taking some Microsoft lawyer at his word, the author wants us to believe that Microsoft has thoroughly changed its spots. Maybe he’s just stupid–but again, it’s probably just the advertising money talking.

Perhaps realizing that he has gone a bit too far to have any credibility on the matter, toward the end of the CNET post the author, Charles Cooper, offers this assertion:

“I’m not going to alibi for Microsoft.”

Fair enough, but only because “alibi” is not used as a verb by most educated people. That aside, Cooper is certainly shilling for Microsoft.

Blame the accountants!! Even in scandal, Dell peddles "world-class" PR

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Maybe it’s hard to spin the financial fraud and subsequent need to restate results over the last few years that Dell has faced due to an internal audit spurred by an SEC investigation, but Don Carty has to try a little harder than this:

‘”All of us are very proud of Dell. We believe we’re a world-class company, and we’re not terribly proud that we found one element of our company that wasn’t world class,” Carty said. “None of us at Dell like this.”‘

How much of the business is your accounting department? Those fraudulent results were reviewed by banks, investors and insurance companies and affected the perception that Dell was the clear leader in personal computers.

That’s not world class.

Now they lag HP, and as I thought might happen a major financial scandal has enveloped Dell–a major one anyway in seriousness if not with the kind of numbers that will threaten the company’s immediate solvency.

So sure. Claim it’s not really a big deal, and look for a scapegoat. Don’t blame the hard-charging corporate culture led by Mr. Dell and the “made-to-order” cult that the company had succeeded in getting into the business school texts. Don’t blame a mediocre product in an ultra-competitive market for Windows machines. Don’t blame the chronic unrealistic expectations of continued 15% growth for all tech companies on the stock market.

No. Blame the accountants. Without Michael Dell even sitting in on the conference call. That’ll work.

Except there’s one problem:

Carty is Dell’s chief financial office (CFO). The “one element of our company that wasn’t world-class,” according to him, was the one his position oversees.

They are still good at PR down there in Austin, even if they can’t pull down the growth numbers they’re supposed to anymore. They managed to spin business school professors and Tom Friedman, so why won’t they manage to spin their way out of this?

They’ll probably find a way. But I don’t know–here’s what MarketWatch says:

‘However, the company may not be out of the woods in the eyes of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dell warned that despite the conclusion of the company’s internal review, “the SEC’s investigation is ongoing, and there can be no assurance that there will not be additional issues or matters arising from that investigation.”‘

Blogs step into new advertising territory

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

More web 2.0 cred showdown news has broken since I wrote on the front page about this advertising controversy involving blogs using Federated Media. Now crunchnotes.com is sounding this rather bitter note:

‘I’m now pissed off at every single person involved in this. Denton for bringing up a non issue to attack competitors, Malik for folding immediately and making it seem like someone did something wrong, and now Battelle, our agent, saying he wished we had made a disclosure on this.

Any competing ad networks out there want our business, and promise not to throw us under a bus whenever Valleywag attacks?’

This story seems to be breaking very quickly–and Battelle is admitting that “we certainly stepped in it.” In what? Microsoft money?