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Take Microsoft, the blogsphere, evaluation laptops (wink,wink), and a slow news week and what do you have? A perfect storm of much bluster and little consequence.

To quickly recap for those with lives:

• Microsoft is launching Vista©™® next year
• They need to get the news out because everyone is so otherwise distracted with their Zunes
• They read the latest issue of Time Magazine, got confused and thought the word blog was a misprint of flog
• Microsoft, through their PR agency Edelman, offered “celebrity” bloggers a copy of Vista©™® to keep evaluate (with a $2200 case to carry it around it, oh, and a copy of Office 2007 might have also slipped in there)
• The bloggers that didn’t get laptops complain about how those that did are morally compromised
• Others justify it while typing on brand new keyboards
• Still others that are offered machines instead mount their high horses
• After all that, Microsoft back peddles and asks for the laptops back - pretty please?
• Valleywag nominates the whole mess for Worst Marketing Campaign of 2006. Given that this year we also saw ‘Welcome to the Social’ as a straight-faced marketing pitch (Microsoft again, ironically) that is saying something.
• (Prediction) Everyone gets drunk on New Year’s Eve and forgets the whole thing moves on to more important debates: like what a tool Robert Scoble is.