Granted, the test drive was useless from any sort of practical perspective.  “[A] write-up of time spent behind the wheel of a car designed entirely for show and never for go will help you in no way to make a purchasing decision,” notes Wert.

But the experience still sounds like a blast, and, unlike what occurred with an old Microsoft-Edelman scandal, all the parties were clear from the start that this was just a temporary loan.

Ideally, someone could mesh that experience with Wert’s – pass out real Ferraris, instead of an Acer Ferrari 1000 notebook, or the keys to a half-baked concept.  But beggars – and bloggers – can’t be choosers, so . . . on with the Camaro convertible.

There were some strict ground rules on Wert’s test drive – no accelerating past “roughly 25-30 mph (I say roughly because there’s no working instrumentation,” for one.  Also, “The seats aren’t the real ones, so you’ve no idea what the sight lines are going to be like in the real thing.”

Then – and I can’t help but laugh at this – Wert writes, “[T]he heat from the engine was causing the paneling on the concept to warp a bit – taking some of that design balance and turning it into an amusement park hall of mirrors.”

Still, as a car enthusiast, I can imagine few bigger rewards for one’s work.  Bloggers everywhere should take heart.

The company wasn’t overly shy about what it had done, however; the press release addressed the subject of “next-generation Web development and design.”  Also, buried deep within it was the phrase, “The combination of Microsoft Silverlight and the latest platform and tooling enhancements make the .NET Framework unequaled for building and delivering Web, Windows, and rich interactive applications.”

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (working off of Nik Cubrilovic’s notes) then delved further into Silverlight’s significance.  Arrington even used a car metaphor, which is always a good thing.

“Nik (a long-time developer) was most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB) and how fast it is,” he wrote, adding that “it blows away native Javascript routines – without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight.”

Now, just to be clear, this isn’t some entirely new product.  Silverlight, as Cubrilovic reported, was “formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere.”

Still, as certain recent examples have proven, product “renamings” can catch a lot of press, and it doesn’t hurt when a writer can add, “My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers).”

Like moths to a flame, Microsoft is finally getting some positive reviews with Silverlight.

Concisely, here’s what’s happening:

1. A few days before Christmas, Microsoft (or Edelman – the lead PR agency for the launch of Vista – depending on which blog post you read) emailed a number of influential US bloggers to ask them if they’d like to receive an Acer Ferrari notebook computer pre-loaded with Vista.

2. No strings attached:

while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like. Just let me know what you plan to do with it when the time comes.

3. Bloggers start posting about the invitation they received; some have already received the computer and blog their first impressions/opinions.

4. Others criticize Microsoft and Edelman with accusations of bribery. Words such as ‘astroturfing,’ ‘payola’ and ‘PayPerPost’ abound.

5. Confusion starts to take hold as some bloggers report that Microsoft is asking for the computers back.

6. The first murmurings start that this is another developing ethics scandal for Edelman.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but what on earth are all these people whingeing about?

Oh wait. From scanning some of the blog posts and comments, it looks like many of the whingers are those who didn’t get an invitation from Microsoft!

Be that as it may, what seems to be the fuel for much of the critical blog commentaries and comments to posts is disclosure. Or rather, lack of it at the outset – few of the bloggers who first started posting mentioned the fact that they’d received the computer from Microsoft for purposes of review. Some of them have subsequently posted updates to their posts with the disclosure.

It’s all a bit messy, a situation that could have been largely avoided if there was a clear requirement that any blogger receiving the laptop must disclose that fact. That wasn’t the case.

If I’d been writing the invitation email, I would have included a sentence that might read something like this:

If you accept this invitation and receive the computer, you must make full disclosure in any blog posts you may publish that you received the machine and software from Microsoft for the purposes of review.

This isn’t bribery or astroturfing or anything nefarious like that. But without the requirement to disclose, you have ambiguity and opacity – things that got Edelman into trouble with Wal-Mart blogger relations programmes a few months ago and earlier this year.

Take into account, too, that with Microsoft, it’s a fair assumption that you can’t please most of the people most of the time.

It’s a tactical PR cock-up, that’s what it is.

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Scoble calls it Payperpost.

Was Thomas Hawk offered one?

Nope.

I’m sure lots of other bloggers were not either though.

Of course, I am on Edelman’s radar and have been included in lots of other Microsoft related things they have done in the past. Microsoft and Edelman are really good at including the bloggers.

I guess, of course, that little article about switching to a Mac a few months before Vista’s big launch didn’t help things. Ha.

Hey I will say this though. The Mac kicks serious ass and I bought the thing with my own money. And if I had to do it over again I would. It was $2,800 very well spent. It’s the best computer I’ve ever used in my life.

Someone from Intel’s PR firm did offer me a free high end laptop about 3 months ago as part of a group blog that they were putting together. The idea was that I’d use the laptop and then write about how I used it. I turned them down. Somehow it just didn’t feel right to me. I also turned down Microsoft’s offer to make me an official Microsoft MVP earlier this year. I’m not saying it’s wrong to take the free laptop. I almost took the one Intel offered but in the end I felt conflicted.

On the other hand I did take the free 750 gig Seagate drive that Robert Scoble gave to me from Seagate. Seagate sponsors his Photowalking show. I’m not sure why that feels differently to me. Maybe it’s because I was already using Seagate (and in fact had purchased three of the identical drives with my own money) and it didn’t feel like the free drive would compromise my opinion of it. It was a pretty public thing, well disclosed, (we even filmed it and included it at the end of the last episode of Photowalking).

It should be noted of course that bloggers don’t have to accept the free laptop to test it. They can test it and send it back. This takes the ethics question off the hand of Edelman I guess and puts it back into the bloggers.

I will try Vista in due time of course and write about my experience with it. Edelman’s been very helpful sending me betas for Vista along the way but I’ve found the betas I’ve received so far to be pretty much unuseable. Not stable enough to really test.

In some ways, Edelman handing out these laptops to bloggers is smart. Why? Because they can control the quality of the Vista experience more than if the bloggers upgraded to Vista on their own machines. By equipping them with high end super fast laptops with known configurations, they are going to get more predictable performance, probably the best possible performance possible from the software. I went to a dinner that Jim Allchin put on for bloggers and he was testing it out on a Ferrari machine. It was damn fast.

My own view is that one of the problems with PCs vs. Macs is that Macs are closed systems and PCs are open systems. The luxury of a closed system is that you can more extensively test the hardware and software to make sure it works well together. With a PC on the other hand, as a more open system it can be used with vastly more hardware and software configurations. The result is that if someone somewhere was sloppy when they configured their driver then you get a bad experience. Sure component manufacturers try to get it right all the time, but there are millions of different ways to configure a PC and realistically they can’t test every configuration.

Of course, I’ll bet that the Ferrari laptops sent out have been tested to death and my guess is that they work very well. The more interesting thing for me to experience will be when I upgrade one of my PCs at home to Vista once it’s out in January. I’d also be interested in seeing a post comparing how one of these free laptops compared to simply upgrading someone’s old home PC.

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“Recommendation systems covering a wide variety of categories will play an increasingly significant commercial role in the future,” said Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder, chairman, and CEO, in the press release. “Right now, we’re driving the Model T version of what is possible. We want to build a Ferrari and establishing the Netflix Prize is a first step.”

The Netflix Prize “was inspired by the unconventional approach used to win the Longitude Prize, which was created in 1714 by the British government to focus on one of the most vexing and dangerous aspects of transoceanic travel – determining a ship’s longitude,” the release stated, noting that “the movie Longitude’ tells this story and is available at Netflix.” A more recent example of this sort of contest (and one that has yet to be turned into a movie) is the Ansari X Prize.

The Netflix Prize probably won’t be quite as challenging to secure, though. “The threshold required to win the Netflix Prize is a 10 percent improvement in accuracy over the current Netflix recommendation system,” according to the press release.

Also, “if no one wins the grand prize this year, the company said it will award a $50,000 progress prize to whoever makes the most significant advancement toward the goal and will award a progress prize annually until someone wins the grand prize.

More of the contest’s details are available here. “And,” Netflix noted, “because of the serious amount of money, there is some important legalese you need to attend to” if you decide to enter.

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Does AOL Need New Spin?

Add the revelations in those internal documents to a bevy of other incidents that includes consumer backlash, a renewed Eliot Spitzer investigation, Geronimo-ing subscribers, pottymouthed Netscape employees, worst-of-the-worst product reviews, and seeds of distrust sown during the Goodmail fiasco, and you have a company whose hot water has reached boiling.

Soon after Vincent Ferrari went national with his recorded phone call to AOL, where he was badgered by a retention consultant ignoring Ferrari’s demand that his account be cancelled, the Member Services team was sent a flurry of memos and policy changes.

According to the memos, EVP of Member Services, Scott Falconer called the aftermath of the incident “severe,” and employees were instructed to assume that any call could be recorded and posted on the Web. Falconer pleads with his staff to be extra helpful to all incoming callers. The Member Services crew also received an update instructing them that they were only to pitch the canceling member two offers before acquiescing if the member declines both.

The new instructions to be nice to customers, even if they’re canceling, does not seem to apply to AOL-owned Netscape employees, especially if they’re dealing with a former customer who caused all this trouble to begin with.

It would appear (though names can be forged in comments sections) Netscape’s Matt Gabels didn’t feel a need to remain anonymous when commenting, nor to visit Ferrari’s blog from outside company walls when he decided to sling profanities at the man. Also via the Consumerist, Gabels calls Ferrari a “poor excuse for a human” and “a laughing stock within AOL.” Another commentator, whose anonymous visit tracked back to within the Netscape camp, uses a colloquialism for a male member to describe him.

Perhaps the nastiness AOL seems desperately trying to correct in the aftermath stems from its own policies. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who fined the company $1.25 million last year because of the difficulty in canceling subscriptions, said he will investigate to see if AOL has held up to the terms of the settlement.

Under the agreement, AOL would hire a third party to verify the quality of retention calls, a move that Falconer humorously calls “an industry first initiative” as if it were not only AOL’s idea, but AOL’s choice as an industry pioneer. But also the agreement requires AOL to drop its system of bonuses that encouraged employees to maintain a retention level of 49 percent.

The Consumerist says that dropping the pressure of a bonus system morphed into a quota system that requires 60 percent retention, and that is job contingent, raising the pressure to retain that much higher. If so, we may understand why “John” was so desperate to talk Ferrari out of canceling, even if he had to get testy with him.

But also, a leaked retention manual reveals that cancellations were made difficult by design, even after Spitzer had slapped the company for that very reason. In the manual, Member Services employees are equated with sales teams, equipped with a multi-step system for dealing with cancellations. A cancellation request is to be considered “a hot lead.”

From the manual:

Most other sales jobs require you to create your own leads, but in the Retention Queue the leads come to you!

It is probably widely whispered and reasoned among employees the key difference is that most other sales professionals focus on people who are actually interested in their product and don’t already hate it. Since in the hot seat, as has been mentioned, the process has been expedited.

So once again the PR nightmare comes down on Nicholas Graham, who, really through no fault of his own, enjoys the onus of spinning this particularly onerous series of events. He says what he has to say, even if the company demonstrates otherwise. Consumerist comes down on him as well:

In a public statement, AOL’s Nicholas Graham claimed that John, “violated our customer service guidelines and practices, and everything that AOL believes to be important in customer care – chief among them being respect for the member, and swiftly honoring their requests.” If this is true, then why is there such a complex system designed to thwart those very requests? Brevity thrives on simplicity.

Yeah well, Graham says a lot of things, and the company has a history of too-little-too-late clean ups. Jon Miller has his work cut out for him too. Hope they have good dancing shoes.

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The Reuters report was terse and vague, and word around the Net is that nobody’s been able to locate the eBay page where the 26-year-old German woman had started the bidding at $1.6 million. It’s not uncommon for a Ferrari Enzo to sell for over a million dollars, so “Leila” herself sets her worth at half a sports car.

“Only a millionaire could afford such a car,” she told Reuters. “I want a man who doesn’t like me just for my money.”

UPDATE: A faithful reader provided the link to Leila’s listing. It doesn’t seem to mention anything about her coming with the car. But she is kind of a Betty.

From the information provided at the bottom, translated from German:

eBay in the past has been very adamant about not selling yourself on their auction site, or your kids, or your immortal soul; you can’t beg for money either. But technically, this isn’t prostitution, even if the listing exists. And it would be a big commission, too. Do a search for an Enzo at eBay Motors, and you’ll notice only accessories, gear, and collectibles – but no cars.

Big ticket items pop up on the site from time to time. In 2000, a Honus Wagner baseball card, baseball’s most valuable card, sold for $1.265 million. Yesterday, lunch with Warren Buffet cost some sucker over $600,000.

Whether or not it’s technically kosher to sell your love along with your Ferrari, whichever lonely tycoon takes her on may not be able to use the new Google Checkout to do it. Shortly after rumors began to surface that Google was developing such a payment service, eBay changed its policy so that new services without a “substantial historical track record” would not be allowed.

We reported on this possibility in October of last year, when the rumor mill was still calling it “Google Purchase.” Sorry, Andy, Marketing Vox was a little late on that one.

Of course, in October, eBay said the change in policy had nothing to do with the rumors because, as spokesperson Hani Durzy put it, “As far as we know, Google does not currently have a payments product, and we can’t comment on something that is mere speculation.”

Not that eBay would do would do anything to cut Google off.

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