We continue our look at the bogus “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert” report.
All of you regular Office Watch readers know that Microsoft hired a PR firm to come up with a completely bogus testimonial – “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert” – which MS posted on its Web site on October 9. Ted Bridis at the Associated Press tracked down the PR company and the author (details here). Microsoft yanked the testimonial and MS brass roundly denounced the subterfuge.
I just bumped into a copy of the original testimonial, and it’s well worth a laugh if you haven’t seen it. There’s also an excellent synopsis of the brouhaha in the October 17 here.
While it isn’t clear (to me) exactly how Ted found Valerie Mallinson, there’s a Word document linked from the original testimonial called ShowOffYourSkills.doc that has two telltale settings in the File | Properties dialog. The first is a Web site – valmalgal.com – shown in the Summary | Company field.
The second is a File | Properties | Custom variable called
_AuthorEmailDisplayName
that has the value
Valerie Mallinson (Wes Rataushk & Assc Inc)
If you’ve been following the Outlook 2002 branding problem I’ve been talking about here in Office Watch, you know that value was undoubtedly tacked on by Outlook 2002 when Valerie emailed the document as an attachment to an email message.
See Also
- Office for Mac gets a .docx converter
- Microsoft “Convert” Nailed by Outlook 2002
- Word effluvia nails bogus “switcher”
