Now Microsoft Wants Its Laptop Back
Microsoft and AMD sent out a pile of very expensive (yet trashy looking) laptops to a number of bloggers over the past week. We were told we could keep them - now after a day of minor outrage by some people they are emailing us back with the following request that we not keep them after all!
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft and AMD seeded high-end laptops to a roster of bloggers with permission to keep them — and within a day of public grumbling reversed course by email, asking recipients to give them back. The reversal is what turned a routine product-seeding push into a story: the pickup spans B.L. Ochman framing it as an 'Edelman ethics scandal,' Monkey Bites calling it an attempt to buy friends, and Robert Scoble defending the giveaway outright on Scobleizer.
The stumble lands at the end of a rough month for Microsoft's outside-facing judgment — earlier in December the company was embarrassed by a porn-prank stunt aimed at its licensing terms. With the blogger class now treated as press worth courting, the episode is becoming a test case for how vendor gifts and editorial independence are supposed to coexist.
First-order effects
- The bloggers who were told they could keep the machines now face a choice that doubles as a public statement — return them, keep them, or disclose — with their credibility on the line either way.
- Microsoft and AMD convert what was meant as goodwill into negative coverage, with the ask-back itself generating more attention than the laptops ever would have.
Second-order effects
- PR firms running blogger-outreach programs — Ochman's post names Edelman specifically — now face clients and audiences demanding clearer rules on disclosure and gift retention before the next seeding campaign ships.
- Competing vendors planning similar hardware giveaways must weigh whether the same tactic reads as generosity or as a bribe, raising the cost of the standard launch-season playbook.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, informal gift-giving to bloggers gives way to written policies — disclosure requirements, return clauses, and ethics guidelines — as companies institutionalize what until now has been ad-hoc schmoozing of a new press corps.
- The episode feeds the broader argument over whether bloggers count as journalists subject to the same independence norms, a fight that will shape how regulators and advertisers treat non-traditional media.
The trend: As blogs win a seat at product launches, corporate seeding programs are colliding with an emerging disclosure ethic that will force both vendors and agencies to codify blogger-outreach rules.