Oppugn.us

NOTE: And I'll (Zed) take it on the head with this one too. Thanks Richard!

Love the hate, but in my book good 'writing' also includes some basic research and a little spell check. If you had devoted more than 2 hours to this exercise in MS-bashing you might have discovered that 'microspotting' isn't some johnny-come-lately, faceless marketing exercise but a fairly long running (c.2007) blog by Microsoft's internal marketing staff. You might have destroyed microspotting.com but its predecessor lives on at http://microspotting.spaces.live.com. And the font is spelled 'Arial'. 'Ariel M Stallings' is indeed flesh and blood. I know this because my wife obsesses over her other blog, http://offbeatbride.com. You could have easily discovered this yourself with a little google, e.g. try her home page http://arielmeadow.com.

Is it legitimate for Microsoft to attempt to humanise their image with genuine posts about staff members? Or must they accept the image you have of them as a clunky but hardcore coding shop for big business? I have no special love for Microsoft but in this case I have a little sympathy: the reason they have to try sites like microspotting in the first place is to counteract the paranoid hatred epitomised by your parody site.

In order to remain competitive, Microsoft has to recruit beyond the narrow band of socially isolated geeks keen to work on new programming languages and build new OSs. They need the odd 'Ariel M Stallings' or two, and maybe even some ruby fanbois. So lets call this for what it was, not a righteous take-down of a 'big mega marketing firm' but an expression of Zed Shaw's dislike for the new social media kids on the block. They might not be able to mind-meld with iPhone OS using their impressive C, but they can at least write.