A Ferrari a day won't keep bad Vista blogs away

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 02 January 2007 08:28

Opinion and Analysis

The controversy surrounding Microsoft's $200,000 plus gift of snazzy Acer Ferrari notebooks loaded with Vista Ultimate to 90 bloggers refuses to go away. What's more the messages coming out of Microsoft appear to be mixed - keep it, don't keep it, auction it for charity - what are the bloggers to do? They should do whatever they want - as long as they keep their independence.

Before we descend to a moral rant berating Microsoft, AMD and the willing gift recipient bloggers again, it might be worth remembering that this practice is not new, not unique to Microsoft and certainly not unique to the IT industry. Looking at my previous article on this subject, I believe I may have been a little harsh on both the bloggers and the vendors (no I didn't receive an Acer Ferrari in the interim).

As a former journalist with two major newspaper groups, one of which was owned by News Corporation, I accepted no less than a dozen trips abroad as a guest of major vendors, including Microsoft, with the full blessing and approval of my editors-in-chief and publishers.

These expensive junkets of years gone by, each costing considerably more than an Acer laptop, enabled me to meet with people such as the heads of the Internet Explorer and Windows CE development teams at Redmond and some of the top people at companies such as HP, IBM and many others.

I attended CeBIT in Hannover twice - once as a guest of Deutsche Messe and once as a guest of the Australian Trade Commission. Neither of the two national newspapers I worked for would have even considered paying for my trips.

If you happen to be a US-based journalist working for one of the major US publications, it's easy to say no to all junkets when many important events and people are a 45 minute drive or flight away. However, if you live in Europe or Australia or India, even the largest local publications would rather have you playing phone jockey all day than spend a cent on travel to an IT event - much less a vendor sponsored one.

Receiving an expensive laptop computer as a gift with no strings attached is a little different to accepting a working trip to a conference, that you can neither trade nor sell. However, it has been a common practice among IT journalists involved with reviewing hardware to accept "long term loan" PCs for periods of months and even longer.

They usually have to sign agreements to return the notebook in good condition and not to subject it to rough treatment. However, it is possible for a reviewer to perpetually use review machines and never to have to own one.