Microsoft: “No Reviews of Kinect!”

[HappySqurriel]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

HappySqurriel said:

szerbijn said:

Microsoft is being smart. And everyone else is being fooled.

Right ...

If it is true that Microsoft is actually trying to avoid pre-launch negative press I certainly wouldn't call this a "smart" move. Strategies like this have been tried several times in a lot of different markets, and (more often than not) it backfires on the company.

The most successful form of marketing is an honest word of mouth campaign; at the same time, the most damaging delivery of negative information is an honest word of mouth campaign. While tricking people into buying into a poor product may save some initial sales, you will lose far more sales in the long run when these people "Talk Trash" about your product whenever it comes up in conversation.

But never underestimate MS' astroturfers army, both payed and those licking Ballmer's arse for free (the only possible explanation for this is that he secerns cocaine and they got addicted  ), MS, also with their help and relentless propaganda work, managed even to sell Win ME, or Win 2000 before SP4 or Win XP before SP2, heck, it managed to sell even Vista!

http://apcmag.com/xp_still_killing_vista_in_sales_volume_hp.htm

However, HP explained how Microsoft is coming up with these "Vista" sales figures.

"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence," said Jane Bradburn, Market Development Manager, Commercial Notebooks for HP Australia.

"However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."

So, in other words, Microsoft counts a sale for Vista, even though the computer manufacturer has really sold XP.

 

Astroturfers, marketing, and "propaganda" rarely work to sell a poor product; but people who are tricked or forced into buying a poor product generally give that product a reputation far worse than it should have had. Vista is the perfect example of this because it was a product that had many improvements over their previous version (XP) but had many flaws at launch and by the time those were (mostly) corrected everyone "knew" it was the worst operating system in history.