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

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 02 January 2007 08:28

Opinion and Analysis

Motoring writers, travel writers, hospitality writers, and writers from other trades are all beneficiaries of similar largesse from time to time. Together with the journalist's lifestyle, it's one of the perks of the job. Some are more precious about it than others, but most put it into perspective and manage to maintain their independence. Quite often reviewers and influential journalists receive "gifts" from competing vendors.

I can remember a fellow IT journalist from a publication I was working for attending the Atlanta Olympics as a guest of IBM, the official information technology provider. When disaster struck the computer systems, he reported the incident faithfully, made front page news and embarrassed his host highly. He could hardly have done otherwise. If he had failed to report the incident, his credibility as an independent journalist would have been shot to pieces.

Putting all this into context of Microsoft and its 90 favourite bloggers, there are some points worth remembering concerning the bloggers. 
Individual journalists, working for low to average pay at major publications, are often not the ones refusing to accept free review hardware from vendors. It is generally their well paid editors and publishers taking the high moral ground.

In the case of bloggers, many have limited financial resources. Receiving a free high performance laptop loaded with Microsoft's best attempt to sway them toward Vista could make a great story, provided they do the right thing and disclose. If any happen to be committed Apple users, the chances are all Microsoft will receive for its trouble is an unfavourable review comparing Vista to Mac OS X.

Those who are Vista Beta users or XP users, here is your chance to tell the public whether Microsoft has finally got Windows right or it's just more of the same.

Should bloggers keep their Ferrari Notebooks? That's up to them. However, if they want to keep their credibility intact when they review Vista (or an Acer notebook for that matter) they should disclose their gift.

By the way, provided my visa arrives in time, I'm off to Macworld Expo in San Francisco next week as a guest of Apple Computer - the first overseas trip I've accepted this Century.