Apparently PR does matter to journalists…
I haven’t received a single personal note from a Microsoft PR person for roughly four years. Instead, the company has taken to sending out very lengthy and somewhat boring cheerleader-type consumer newsletters to the media in an attempt to keep us informed. It’s essentially spam with lots of links and no real compelling content, which seems to be the work of someone who has recently finished taking English as a Second Language courses.
I wouldn’t draw any conclusions on MSFT’s marketing effectiveness until post launch. Windows 7 is stunning. Office 10 is even better.
So, the traditional 20th Century form of the seenpapwr story is designed for the telegraph. The telegraph killed our culture’ too: it killed those flowery narrative stories, with the news deeply buried, that seenpapwrs ran in the 19th Century. Some day something will kill twitter and blogs. Yet somehow the culture persists.