IP: Reader Report: Windows XP at the Post Office

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 15:03:53 -0500
> From: Gene Gaines <gene.gaines () gainesgroup com>
>
> Good lord!
>
> Gene
>
> http://www.macintouch.com/postoffice.html
>
>
> Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 23:12:35 -0600
> From: Cliff Crouch
> Subject: United States of America "versus" Microsoft???
>
> Just when I think events can't get any weirder, they do: I go into a 
> United States Post Office today, and encounter a poster touting, not the 
> latest stamps, but Microsoft Windows XP -- *plus* a Windows XP promotional 
> CD-ROM display.
>
> Yes, today is the "Martin Luther King birthday" holiday, officially 
> observed throughout the United States, but this is the one post office in 
> my hometown of Houston that stays open regardless (it's at Bush 
> Intercontinental Airport).
>
> I take care of my business with the clerk at the counter and am headed 
> back out when I observe, mounted in the window, a full-size poster (with 
> the ubiquitous "flat-green-landscape-against-blue-sky" theme of MS's 
> latest marketing barrage):
>
> Microsoft
>
> THE DIGITAL WORLD IS CALLING.
>
> Please take a free demo CD.
>
> Microsoft Windows XP
>
> I stand there mystified for a minute, and the clerk calls out, "Did you 
> need something else, sir?"
>
> I motion to the poster and say, "What's this all about?" By way of 
> response, she bustles over to a corner of her workplace and fetches a 
> promotional CD-ROM in a pasteboard slipcase: "Microsoft Windows XP -- 
> eXPerience the excitement!"
>
> "Here ya go!" she says as she hands it to me over the counter.
>
> "So, uh ... did Microsoft buy the Post Office recently?" I ask.
>
> "Oh, I think you can get these from UPS or FedEx, too," she says blithely, 
> by way of "explanation," and goes back to work.
>
> On my way to the door, I now notice a similarly themed Windows XP "dump" 
> -- that is, a cardboard display with a niche for holding two-dozen or so 
> promotional CDs -- sitting atop one of the tables in the customer area.
>
> Neither the poster nor the cardboard dump even pretends to have any tie-in 
> to the U.S. Post Office; it's just plain, unvarnished Windows XP puffery 
> ... the kind of material that Microsoft pays to run in print media and on TV.
>
> Has anyone else come across anything else like this? And am I simply 
> naive, or is there something profoundly disturbing about such shenanigans 
> going on even as District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly allegedly 
> mulls the proper punishment of the Microsoft Corporation, an illegal 
> monopoly, for violating U.S. antitrust law?
>
> Bemused, befuddled, & bewildered,
> Cliff Crouch
>
>
>
>
>
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