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Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

I find it more interesting how incredibly shady and underhanded the entire "challenge" is to begin with. They get to choose the exact rules and conditions, for which they've specially customized their phones beforehand, even if it's completely outside the bounds of what an average consumer would ever do.

In this case, it was to show the weather of two different cities. The only reason the contestant won was because he happened to need that information enough in his day-to-day life to warrant the two separate weather widgets on his home screen. The Microsoft representative obviously knew what the challenge would be going in, and already had the tiles ready to go.

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To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt. No one I can see is looking at the results and claiming any kind of objective superiority. What MS wants is just to get you into the store and show you their cool phones -- "Can your phone do this?" stuff. So they dangle a carrot (the prize) to get you in the door.

Where it went off the rails is that somehow the store staff didn't feel comfortable actually awarding the prizes. That is shady, and it implies that the incentives are screwed up internally: if the stores get punished for prize awards, do they likewise get hurt for providing other stuff with dollar values attached (what would normally be called "good customer service")?

To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt

I'm a pretty in touch, technically focused person and I didn't think it was the farce that it actually was. I thought they were legitimately demoing average things that people were doing, from scratch, highlighting the benefits of the platform.

That they pre-configure their device for ridiculous scenarios is simply incredible. That the now much more apologetic Microsoft rep originally offered a rematch on the incredibly long odds seemed extraordinary.

"To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt."

Does that really make it OK though? Do you feel OK giving your money to companies that use "stunts", if you're aware of the stunt? I don't. I find it disingenuous. It feels like those door-to-door vacuum salesmen who dump crap on your carpet. Blech, no thank you!

Show me the product. Let me try it out. Trust me to recognize where you've done well. Feel free to point out areas where you think you've done well, but these "head to head" contests are just silly, and they can easily turn around and bite you, as we've seen here. Just skip it and let people make their own assessment.

I guess. But in a world where you can't even watch a youtube video or read a web forum without getting hit by the same kind of nonsense product marketing, it seems like awfully mild sauce to be condemning Microsoft for pulling the same tricks. The marketing itself (but not the refusal to honor the prize) just doesn't tickle my outrage meter, sorry.

The

Right, it's like midway booths at the State Fair. You know the games are jaded and you only play for fun. But if you win and they don't give you the toy, then it's just not honest.

Reasonable that a contest Microsoft is hosting to promote their own product is skewered towards their own product.

The thing is, most of the Smoked by Windows Phone challenges (at least those that they did at CES and MWC) are actually pretty everyday tasks like uploading a photo, posting something to social networks etc. Those actually do make some sense.

Though, they did screw up this one pretty badly. Instead of giving out a $1k prize they're now paying way, way more with all the bad PR...

> Reasonable that a contest Microsoft is hosting to promote their own product is skewered towards their own product.

No. It's not reasonable at all. If you propose a challenge, I would assume you want to prove a point beyond how much you can stack the deck (we already know they can go very far with that).

Wouldn't it be nicer if they actually had a superior product instead? If they have a superior product, like they claim, why do they need to manipulate the rules to favor their product?

You can't objectively prove that one smartphone is the best. You can only point out some of the things one smartphone platform does better than other ones, and those are exactly the things that Microsoft has chosen for their challenge. That's what I meant with "skewer", but it's really just highlighting your own, unique strengths.

You can't, but you can make a phone that is easier/more practical than the competition for a couple common use cases. When you have a product that can stand on its own, then you make a campaign like this one. Whatever you do, you don't open yourself up for this kind of accusation.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/rdgtz/i_won_the_...

You may not have read the article this post was about. It's referring to exactly that incident.

If you read the link I sent, the thread was about the original article incident, but the post was about another, where, among other things, it seemed Microsoft was throttling the bandwidth so that competing phones would appear slower.

This just plain dishonest.

"Specially customized their phones"?

If you mean specially designed the phones to be efficient at every day tasks, then you are correct. Don't get all bent out of shape because of your loathing of Microsoft.

I wouldn't call it loathing a company when pointing out the obvious flaws in a rigged contest.

I hope in future versions they rig WindowsPhones to do more things correctly.

You must not have read the article. The challenge was to pull up the weather in 2 different cities (later, the manager said 2 cities in different states)

The reps phone just "happened" to have LiveTiles setup so that the weather in 2 cities was the first thing on the home screen.

They knew the challenge, and setup their phone do win it as fast as possible. The "Specially customized their phones" comment is that they rigged the phone to be near-unbeatable ahead of time, since they made the challenge.

Can you honestly not see that they stacked the competition in their favor by customizing the device from its stock install state?

And not that it's relevant, but I like Microsoft's products. I think their direction of the latest Windows Phones are great. I'd rather they didn't resort to cheap tricks to try and "prove" that their product is better.

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