4 ms·

Is it me or are there a lot of articles indirectly promoting Microsoft on HN these days? It's getting harder and harder to tell if those are genuine news or a

Is it me or are there a lot of articles indirectly promoting Microsoft on HN these days? It's getting harder and harder to tell if those are genuine news or a PR firm at work, but "MS breaks a records in meeting minutes" feels even more like advertising than "Azur is getting 10 times more traffic". If this is advertising, is there a way to prevent them from staying on the front page?

mattferderer 7y ago
Look for trends in the articles posted by the person who posted it. My guess is some people just post anything Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook related.
nitinreddy88 7y ago
I don't think Microsoft needs promotion currently, atleast during these times. Their main revenue is from Enterprise market and during such slow growth, no Enterprise shifts to newer platform over the night. I am just saying, we shouldn't be negative about everything, just because it's Microsoft.
barney54 7y ago
Are you asking if VentureBeat is genuine news or a PR firm?
ssully 7y ago
It's not just Microsoft, I've seen similar articles from other telework apps (Zoom, Slack, etc) and from internet providers talking about the increased activity they are seeing. I think it just comes with out current situation.
judge2020 7y ago
I doubt anyone's being paid by MS here, but MS puts out blog posts and will release numbers that news publications can write easy, free articles based on.
whyaduck 7y ago
My anecdote: I work for a F100 company that's in the midst of a (long) transition to Office 365. In a mid-level engineering staff meeting 2 days ago where we spent 20 minutes discussing the advantages of Teams over Skype for Business, and what could be done to accelerate our transition. All driven by WFH - Office 365 applications don't require a VPN connection in our org, while Outlook/Skype does.
tester756 7y ago
I do wonder whether zoom wasn't target of competition in news
derefr 7y ago
Some companies (like today’s Microsoft, apparently) have PR arms that are actually good at their jobs—writing articles that are, independent of their ability to advertise their company, actually intellectually gratifying in some way. People who post things to HN, independent of being shills for any given company, like to post intellectually gratifying things. Sometimes those things happen to also be PR pieces. I don’t think the people who post these things really think about them as being PR pieces; or, if they do, they post them despite that, because in the balance, the piece still works out to be worth reading (in their opinion) even after giving it a demerit for being PR. I’m not denying that there are shills on HN, mind you. I’m sure there are many of them. But I would say that even those shills probably have some sort of “standards”—only posting the PR pieces available to them if they think they’ll do well here (which means, only posting the pieces someone else who wasn’t a shill would have posted anyway.) To do otherwise might get them banned as spammers (which I do believe does happen—mods want to chime in on that?) And then we still have the filter of some amount of upvoting being required to get things to the front page, plus (I assume) some sort of behind-the-scenes voting-ring detection. So the upvote signal is likely to express genuine community interest, and therefore to signal that the piece does have value independent of its PR-power.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  Good PR is not doing the post yourself, but creating a post that is passable enough to be posted by a regular user on your behalf. Just because it is well done does not mean it has good value as news. Indeed, even if it's an ok read, it's giving a lot of attention to a company just because it has the money to attract said attention, no matter the quality of their service. Since the reader's time and energy is limited, it's taking the place of another possible read. In the same way, by allowing this to happen, this lets a company create a fantastic image of itself, that is independent from it's real quality, just because it has the budget to do it. Cumulatively, this can, after years, end up rewriting history, and lead even educated people to make altered judgements and decisions in the future. I'm not saying that as an anti-microsoft attack, I dislike the concept of such powerful PR in general, MS is just here a potential example for this. As an HN reader, I wish there would be a policy about this. But I have no idea what it would look like, or how one could enforce it. So maybe I'm just making a lot of noise for nothing.
paulirwin 7y ago
This should probably be the HN link to the original source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/09/remote-work-trend-report-meetings/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/0... From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
blaser-waffle 7y ago
HN has a demographic. If you're trying to influence the technocratic types you target this place, too. Hell, HN is the organ of a startup incubator -- I'd argue that it exists to explicitly flog certain technical firms. That other companies are able to get their marketing teams on here too is may be a bug or a feature.

mattferderer 7y ago

Look for trends in the articles posted by the person who posted it. My guess is some people just post anything Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook related.

nitinreddy88 7y ago

I don't think Microsoft needs promotion currently, atleast during these times. Their main revenue is from Enterprise market and during such slow growth, no Enterprise shifts to newer platform over the night. I am just saying, we shouldn't be negative about everything, just because it's Microsoft.

barney54 7y ago

Are you asking if VentureBeat is genuine news or a PR firm?

ssully 7y ago

It's not just Microsoft, I've seen similar articles from other telework apps (Zoom, Slack, etc) and from internet providers talking about the increased activity they are seeing. I think it just comes with out current situation.

judge2020 7y ago

I doubt anyone's being paid by MS here, but MS puts out blog posts and will release numbers that news publications can write easy, free articles based on.

whyaduck 7y ago

My anecdote: I work for a F100 company that's in the midst of a (long) transition to Office 365. In a mid-level engineering staff meeting 2 days ago where we spent 20 minutes discussing the advantages of Teams over Skype for Business, and what could be done to accelerate our transition. All driven by WFH - Office 365 applications don't require a VPN connection in our org, while Outlook/Skype does.

tester756 7y ago

I do wonder whether zoom wasn't target of competition in news

derefr 7y ago

Some companies (like today’s Microsoft, apparently) have PR arms that are actually good at their jobs—writing articles that are, independent of their ability to advertise their company, actually intellectually gratifying in some way. People who post things to HN, independent of being shills for any given company, like to post intellectually gratifying things. Sometimes those things happen to also be PR pieces. I don’t think the people who post these things really think about them as being PR pieces; or, if they do, they post them despite that, because in the balance, the piece still works out to be worth reading (in their opinion) even after giving it a demerit for being PR. I’m not denying that there are shills on HN, mind you. I’m sure there are many of them. But I would say that even those shills probably have some sort of “standards”—only posting the PR pieces available to them if they think they’ll do well here (which means, only posting the pieces someone else who wasn’t a shill would have posted anyway.) To do otherwise might get them banned as spammers (which I do believe does happen—mods want to chime in on that?) And then we still have the filter of some amount of upvoting being required to get things to the front page, plus (I assume) some sort of behind-the-scenes voting-ring detection. So the upvote signal is likely to express genuine community interest, and therefore to signal that the piece does have value independent of its PR-power.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
Good PR is not doing the post yourself, but creating a post that is passable enough to be posted by a regular user on your behalf. Just because it is well done does not mean it has good value as news. Indeed, even if it's an ok read, it's giving a lot of attention to a company just because it has the money to attract said attention, no matter the quality of their service. Since the reader's time and energy is limited, it's taking the place of another possible read. In the same way, by allowing this to happen, this lets a company create a fantastic image of itself, that is independent from it's real quality, just because it has the budget to do it. Cumulatively, this can, after years, end up rewriting history, and lead even educated people to make altered judgements and decisions in the future. I'm not saying that as an anti-microsoft attack, I dislike the concept of such powerful PR in general, MS is just here a potential example for this. As an HN reader, I wish there would be a policy about this. But I have no idea what it would look like, or how one could enforce it. So maybe I'm just making a lot of noise for nothing.

paulirwin 7y ago

This should probably be the HN link to the original source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/09/remote-work-trend-report-meetings/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/0... From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

blaser-waffle 7y ago

HN has a demographic. If you're trying to influence the technocratic types you target this place, too. Hell, HN is the organ of a startup incubator -- I'd argue that it exists to explicitly flog certain technical firms. That other companies are able to get their marketing teams on here too is may be a bug or a feature.