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Comment by ZachPruckowski | Hacker News Reader

>The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice.

Regardless, I blame Microsoft for not understanding marketing. The whole point of doing this sort of Q&A thing is to give a community exclusive access to build rapport. That's just basic. And they promised exclusive access and instead delivered marketing tripe where people were expecting exclusive developer commentary.

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At some level Microsoft know's they're not ideally cut out for doing this type of dynamic marketing. Which is why they put the reddit team in charge of the campagin in the first place.

The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post would be a disaster. If they didn't do that convincingly enough, that's their fault.

> The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post would be a disaster

I dunno. If you look at some of the more technical stuff the MS devs post on channel9 (and some of it being really, really good) you could almost imagine that there could have been an interesting and informative exchange of information here.

Honestly, I don't think there could have. Take for example, the question on spell checking. The right response, IMO, would have been. "Given everything else we needed to do and still needs to do, this is pretty far down on the priority list."

I'm sure that would have been disliked just as much as their response, which I actually sort of liked as it went into more detail about how items get prioritized.

But a general tip to the IE team... you can tell customers your decisions, not how you arrived at them. In general the most vocal people will be those that disagree with your decisions, and can then attack how you made the decisions.

>How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice.

I now have reason to believe you're correct.

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