A friend brought this to my attention just now. It’s very interesting (at least to us) and I figure I’d share. The following page was posted on Microsoft’s official site this morning (if the first link doesn’t work, try the next):

Link #1
a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:JmwQcVoG-ucJ:www.microsoft.com/insider/opsystems/windowsxp_setup.asp+windowsxp_setup.asp&hl=en&ie=UTF-8″>Link #2

Read through it completely. If it doesn’t work, I took a screen capture of the site that you can find here.

Obviously, it’s some sort of marketing strategy to counter Apple’s very successful Switch campaign. Read into it a little more and the other obvious thing you’ll see is that it’s a bunch of bullsh*t written by some low-level boring marketing guy trying to be “trendy”, somewhat technical, and is in fact NOT the girl pictured on that page (like it claims to be). Well ok, so MS had one of the marketing guys do the writing for her. The important thing is they’re showing real people making the real switch from Apple to MS, right? Wrong again. The girl isn’t even real. After this page surfaced this morning, this page was also found showing who this girl actually is. Just another nameless face in a bunch of stock photography.

The page on Microsoft’s site mysteriously went away about an hour ago. You would think that with the marketing power behind a company like Microsoft, they could come up with something that ISN’T a complete lie. I mean I’m sure there’s been a good amount of people who’ve switched from a Mac to Windows XP. Is there something wrong with their stories? There is no getting around something like this. They were caught red handed. Just something to think about.

Update: Check out the article CNET is now running. Seems like MS has officially fessed up to the lie, is very sorry about the whole thing, and “regrets the action”. They have also stated they will NOT do any “convert” ad dealing with the subject. Bad MS…