Gatesbasher - 30 August 2007 04:32 PM

I can’t believe some money doesn’t change hands when these kind of stories appear. Microsoft apparently can’t buy a clue at any price, but they can procure this sort of “journalism.”

There’s gotta be a lot of this kind of stuff going on behind the scenes.

For example, it’s been reported that Mozilla makes tens of millions of dollars each year from Google, which pays for advertisement click-throughs on their search engine-- from Firefox users. Apple may get something similar from Safari’s default of Google as the search engine. Millions of users, billions of searches, millions of dollars.

Microsoft can’t get much legitimate press, so they’ve resorted to buying research, buying bloggers, spending their money to affect public opinion.

My opinion can change if they pay me enough. Say, for $10,000, I’ll tell everyone what I really think of Windows.

To a certain extent I don’t care if people get paid to blog something, or paid to review stuff.  My beef is that they really should be forced to disclose the fact that they did and who paid them.  Then the public can decide if its an honest opinion or just someone shilling for a company.  Additionally any money paid should not be dependent on getting a good review.

There is no such thing as an unbiased opinion when you are getting paid by a company to review their product.  I can’t think of a single situation in which a company would pay for a negative opinion or review.

And that is exactly the point.  That is why they should have to disclose that they got paid by the company to do the review.  In fact they should disclose if they received the product for free to review, after all that is essentially getting paid.  Its funny how people take these reviews as unbiased though.  I always take reviews with a grain of salt.

The guys who talk the most smack usually don’t have a clue as to what they are actually saying.