I had to check whois to be sure this wasn't a parody. What are these guys thinking?
Look, why is it so strange that Microsoft has a blog profiling people around the company who like their jobs? Are we supposed to cut ourselves every morning because we work for the "evil empire"? I don't understand why you think the site is somehow ridiculous, evil or insane. You know, of the 90,000+ people Microsoft employs, most of them actually like what they do.
Astroturfing implies that something is not true. Are you seriously arguing that people who work for Microsoft cannot possibly actually enjoy it?
The reason this site looks fishy is because it is pretty far from the way Microsoft usually presents itself. This blog seems to be going out of its way to find people who don't look like typical Microsoft employees, the interviewer asks them non-Microsoft questions, and so on. It's trying way too hard to present Microsoft as being a place that employs cool, edgy people.
Not at all! Astroturfing is not about lying, it's about creating a false impression of disinterested third party opinions, when the whole thing is controlled by an interested party.
This site straddles the line. They're not hiding their MS affiliation, but they're not drawing attention to it either. The suggestion is that there's this cute emo girl who wanders the halls of Microsoft because she just loves being around guys like this. Let's face it, having a girl like this be fascinated with the details of our work probably ranks pretty high on (male, heterosexual) hacker fantasies. And that was the whole point.
Furthermore the probably astroturfed comments also give us a false impression that other people think MS developers are pretty rad.
I honestly did have to check whois. When I first saw this, I thought it was someone making fun of Microsoft.
The ironic thing is, if it had been a parody, I'd have killed it, because it was (or would have been) so heavy handed. But since it's really from Microsoft, it's on-topic, because it's an interesting data point about how completely the company has lost its way.
It goes back many years:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7107499611244156089
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZvhPGXrg0g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_Kkb9w5bw
They're all pretty uncomfortable to watch, and are like a parody of someone trying to be funny.
However, I don't think Microsoft not getting it is sufficient reason for us to ignore them. They've done something really right somewhere along the way. I'm not sure exactly what it was, or if they're still doing it, but perhaps staring at it from multiple angles will help figure it out.
From the looks of this thing, I am guessing that Microsoft is losing all the best hires to google and startups, and they're hoping to reverse the trend. Seems kind of par for the course, doesn't it?