Some early results of the $1000 WP7 challenge at CA stores

http://skattertech.com/2012/03/i-won-the-windows-phone-challenge-but-lost-just-because/

The Microsoft Store employee I was up against then explained the selected challenge. Her exact words were the following: "bring up the weather of two different cities." The one who could do that first would win. 

...

After a three-second count down, I hit the power button on my phone and said "DONE!" out loud.

..

My opponent finished a split-second later. She had two live tiles on her home screen displaying the weather of two different cities as well. Why does it take longer on Windows Phone? She had to perform two actions. First, she hit the power button to turn on the screen. 

..

After pressing for a better reason, I was told that Windows Phone won "just because."

http://content.microsoftstore.com/store/SmokedByWindowsPhone/Santa-Clara-CA?WT.mc_id=onlinestore_herobanner

Wow, I'm totally shocked that Microsoft marketing is dishonest that way.

Actually I'm being sarcastic. I am not shocked at all.

Is this smart marketing? No, because people these days can tell the public what happened, and they usually do. It's not contained to the event or the store with a few witnesses.

Now this story is all over Hacker News and people are disgusted.

Jesu's... You on some kind of crusade? Your mom ever told you nobody likes a big assh0le?

I feel bad for the people who have to sign away their image and copyright rights to appear in promotional videos for the cost of a cheap Windows Phone.

I don't think Google would do that. I think it's one of the things barred by "Do no evil"

I've never seen Apple stoop to that either in their entire history.

You didn't answer my question about your mom

Wow that is pretty disgusting. Yeah I bet your mom would think the Microsoft Store personnel conducting the contest were assh0les.

 01001011 wrote

I've never seen Apple stoop to that either in their entire history.

How about one of the founders of Apple:

"1972:  Jobs becomes one of the first 50 employees at Atari, under Atari  founder Nolan K. Bushnell. Jobs later  asks Woz for help in creating the sequel to the smash hit "Pong",  entitled "Breakout". Jobs cheats Woz out of $5000."

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/history.html

Google isn't very ethical either:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/19/an-open-letter-to-google/

However, Google does seem to be getting it:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/google-abandons-renewable-energy-projects/

@Proton2:

You're comparing Google, a large organization with a history of helping on humanitarian issues http://www.google.org to Microsoft putting economically challenged people on camera who practiced on their phone and went to their store thinking they would have a chance to supplement their income by putting whatever they won there on eBay shortly after they left the store. Only to find out that it's a game you just can't win.

Big Microsoft exploiting little people.

@1001011: Yeah, Bill Gates never did anything for the common good with the money he earned while working at Microsoft.

Microsoft is the root of all evil!

Google isn't very ethical either:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/19/an-open-letter-to-google/

You have a very propagandist view of what is ethical and what isn't. You could have objected to them restricting searches in China, hoovering up tons of personal data, taking photographs of people and their children via Google cars, blatantly flouting a request by the EU to not change their privacy plan or their attempt to publish millions of books without giving money to the copyright holder, but no, you choose to disagree with Google for them joining the millions of other scientists in the world to try to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Way to have an unbiased viewpoint and not letting your denialist agenda slip into every possible discussion, proton.

@evildictaitor: You know, by responding, you are actually giving weight to his postings?

And by insulting him, by calling him a denialist (whatever that means or whatever you mean by that) and claiming that he has somesort of an agenda (whatever that may be), you are not making a very strong case against him, but against yourself.

I respect you dude, but just let it slide,..

This is an interesting story. 

Very sad to see how quickly this thread has degraded into name calling and about things which have absolutely nothing to do with this specific incident.   

I'm sure there is a lot of background here between the posters, but honestly I don't really care, all I see is a bunch of people trying to troll one another.  

I think the most disturbing part of the story is this:

I was then asked to snap a photo in front of a sign that read along the lines of "My Android was smoked by Windows Phone" before leaving the store.

Taking the pictures is bad enough, but I hope that Microsoft isn't stupid enough to actually use them in any promotion. That is not the way to win people over. If they can't see that then they may as well throw in the towel now.

This whole campaign looks cool in the head of some marketing person, but it real life it really wrubs people the wrong way.

I really dont care about speed. I care about the high quality platform, the ease of development, the excellent integration with other http technologies, the sync of all my contacts, the ease of operation, the look and feel, etc. etc.

I really wish Microsoft would stop comparing their products to other people's products. Rule one in marketing, never ever mention the product of the competitor. Didnt they learn from the It's a Windows PC campaign?

It's like that Mac vs. PC guy. It was cool when he was just a PC. When they started bashing Vista, it became a commercial for Vista rather then Apple. In the last one they mentioned Windows and Vista a dozen times and Apple and Mac not once!

And I'm not impressed and not letting people win it, it's making me angry.

I don't think either one should have won that...they both had optimized their respective start screens for the task. WP7...already had the two cities preloaded as live tiles. Nexus...already had two city widgets. It basically came down to who could read theirs faster, and more specifically, who could get around their lock screen quicker. Now, I don't think what the store employee did (or the manager's subsequent response) was right in any way. I think the employee was just expecting WP7 to win because live tiles should give it the edge, but freaked out when he couldn't explain the results. Instead of being more dynamic and just accepting the loss, he decided to go down a very bad path. However, I don't think his behavior should be representative of Microsoft as a whole, and heck, we're basing this all off of one person's blog post. Also, the test could have been designed better.

@MasterPie: Of course we only have the blog-posters word for it all ...  not to cast aspersions, but just accepting one version of events without question isn't very smart as people's memories aren't always reliable with regard to 'split-second' events (perhaps the WP7 girl held her phone up before vocalising, perhaps the writer didn't speak loudly enough to be heard, or perhaps the store manager really was just an *-hat). Unfortunately in this case we only have the one version.

Herbie

I think this is a problem of scale.  When Ben the PC kicked it off it was a novel, ground breaking idea with all the right ingrediants (it was fresh, it was risky and even possibly a little cool).  

When it got turned into a marketing gimic the ingrediants just don't stack up (Its not fresh any more, looks like the risk has been mitigated and any coolness factor evaporates with the mearest hint of 'marketing' involvment. 

@Ian2: Scale also in the sense that Ben isn't the one doing it. Whereas Ben would have been more confident, accepting defeat while knowing the platform will gain a lot of victories, you have a new employee who probably thinks she'll get fired if she's defeated or something like that.

@Dr Herbie: Yeah, when I first read this blog post it didn't hold up for me. First, there have been several "winners" in this campaign. They've all been counted, and most have been shown in videos. This makes it seem unlikely that this particular "win" would be denied without reason. Further, anyone in marketing would have known that the backlash from something like this probably wouldn't be worth denying a "win" even if there were good cause to. Too me that all adds up to "possible but not probable". Makes me wonder why folks are so quick to believe one blog post from an anonymous person in situations like this?