It's a question of trust

Recently, two gushing user testimonials appeared on Microsoft's website. They seemed a little too good to be true - but surely no one would stoop to faking them? Andy Goldberg investigates

A couple of weeks ago, a page appeared somewhere deep in Microsoft's vast website. "Mac to PC: Mission Accomplished, Convert Thrilled," it said, below a picture of a glamorous – but businesslike – woman. "After eight years as a Macintosh owner I switched to a PC. Why? It's about more and better... The process of switching was as easy as the marketing hype had promised. I was up and running in less than a day, Girl Scout's honour."

It was clearly a reaction to Apple's own multi-million-dollar "switcher" campaign, running nationally in the US and featuring real people who have moved from PCs to Macs. Not a very high-key one, no, but a reaction all the same.

Within hours of its appearance, however, the tale appeared to be unravelling. Sharp-witted Apple-lovers at the nerdy news site Slashdot.com commented that the anonymous freelance writer wrote a little too much like a Microsoft marketing wonk, including step-by-step guides for installing files that were cut and pasted from the Microsoft manuals that no one else ever reads. The writer even called her Outlook e-mail program a "messaging and collaboration client". Compared to the Apple switchers, who talk unscripted in their own words, it was stilted at best.

Then, another Slashdotter spotted that her picture was actually a stock photo shot – and not even from the Microsoft-owned Corbis collection. The net community snickered at Microsoft's expense. Finally, the Associated Press's Ted Bridis followed the information hidden within the Word files downloadable from the page to trace their creator to a PR company that had been hired by Microsoft.

Within hours of being discovered, and then deconstructed, the page was pulled from Microsoft's site. But not quickly enough to prevent countless people preserving screenshots and even entire copies around the web, so they could have a laugh when they needed cheering up.

For Microsoft, that would have been bad – and unnecessary – enough: a PR company writing testimonials about a conversion from Apple, which has, at best, 5 per cent of the desktop market, against Microsoft's 95-odd per cent. The New York Times called it "a laughing stock".

But then something else happened. Another "hoax" was uncovered. This time, the "Microsoft user" was an 11-year-old African-American boy who was explaining how Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia had helped him ace his homework. For a seventh-grader, he appeared to be surprisingly articulate and tech-savvy, although stylistically, his sentences did suffer from a tendency to drag.

"I can't begin to tell you all the ways that Encarta helped with that first assignment, though I should mention that the historical map of France from the interactive world atlas and the drawing of Louis XVI from the multimedia/photos section, both of which I printed, made a stunning centrepiece for my poster," he wrote.

"The features never seem to stop," he continued. "Up-to-date content delivered as soon as it is available; 2D and 3D virtual tours of famous monuments and natural features; the dictionary, thesaurus, and translation dictionaries; and the web center with real-time news right on my computer as it happens."

When Microsoft analyst Mat Rossof first saw the ads he was convinced that they were a parody. "I was surprised they could be so blatant and stupid," he said.

Then, like obscure species in a threatened rainforest, both "testimonials" had vanished. You can be sure, though, that net denizens are scouring Microsoft's site, and Google's cache (of pages it has visited), for others like them, like botanists searching for rare specimens. Testimonial-hunting has, briefly, become a delicious sport.

But others were less surprised. Microsoft prides itself on innovation – although others have repeatedly questioned how much of that innovation is home-grown, and how much is "borrowed" from others. A long analysis at http://www.vcnet.com /bms/departments/innovation.shtml suggests that its only verifiable ones are the "talking paperclip" in Office, and Microsoft "Bob", a sort of dumbed-down computing. (There are some pending, though; the jury is still out.) Neither of these is a great gift to computing, exactly.

In addition, the company's rise to the top has always been helped by its willingness to manipulate in order to achieve an advantage. It broke antitrust law to destroy Netscape when that start-up's technology seemed to threaten the dominance of Windows. When it was brought to trial for doing so, it kept on obfuscating, driving Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to the point of fury.

There was Bill Gates's famously hostile video deposition, the claim that Windows Explorer could not be extricated from the operating system (backed up by doctored videos), and the flooding of newspapers with letters of support – which had been, reportedly, written by PRs who paid real people to sign their names. It was even alleged that the letters of support were signed with dead peoples' names.

On that scale, perhaps you can understand that Microsoft's reaction to the latest fiasco was to laugh it off. "I don't think it's damaging," said Windows product manager Charmaine Gravning. "People are just having fun with it."

Gravning explained away the testimonials as the work of an "outside marketing group" that had not been approved by Microsoft managers, but insisted that it reflected "the writer's true experience". She also argued that Microsoft would never actually stoop to respond to Apple's advertising campaign. "It's not our tactics," she said. "Why would we stomp on Apple when we have 95 per cent of the market?"

But why put it up on the Microsoft site at all? And why then take it down, and the other "testimonial"? Maybe Microsoft regards such actions as trivial. But it's clearly been stung.

The embarrassment comes at a crucial time for the company. A federal judge is still considering whether to approve the antitrust settlement reached between Microsoft and the Justice Department. Though these events won't affect the judgement, they're the sort of incidents that can be used by opponents to argue that the settlement represents absurdly lenient terms, offered by a Justice Department in cahoots with big business.

And it's not only the courts that Microsoft still has to worry about. It needs to win the trust of corporations and consumers worldwide if it's to succeed in its central long-term plans.

The problem remains that Microsoft has difficulties persuading people to trust it, both in what it does and what it offers. Take its .Net strategy, which envisages Microsoft dominating an internet-centric world, in which users would entrust their personal information to an alliance of Microsoft-sanctioned sites.

Microsoft's potential commercial partners balked at the grandiose plan that would have made the corporation an intermediary in almost every online transaction. Consumer aversion has hastened the plan's demise. It still lives on, but just over a week ago hackers got into Microsoft's beta-testing server for .Net and stole copies of the unreleased products there. "They are not grabbing [raw] code; they are grabbing product, and it's going to be buggy and it's going to have problems," said spokesman Rick Miller. "This is obviously not good, but it's not terrible, either." Somehow, none of it is reassuring – first that the server was hacked, and then that what was there was "buggy".

Earlier this year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates shot off a company-wide memo urging his 36,000 workers to embark on a crusade of "trustworthy computing".

It's a nice idea. But wouldn't some trustworthy web pages be a start, Bill?