For Journalists, It's Christmas All Year Around

Edelman is the external pr firm for Microsoft, and a number of bloggers are today reporting that they received no-need-to-return notebook computers with Vista preinstalled (on a 120GB drive, I note).

Edelman is also the external pr firm for Adobe, and they were giving away loot with the launch of Acrobat 8 (a Logitech Webcam that didn't work for me). "Loot" is the technical term journalists use for gifts received from corporations. I think its origin goes back to the looting of Rome, which may well have been carried out by journalists, who had gotten bored of merely bringing down Caesars through scandal exposes.

Edelman is also the external pr firm for Autodesk.

Not that gift-giving isn't already rampant in the CAD industry. Journalists like me got a HP iPaq from COFES a few years ago, an iPod from SolidWorks last year, a GPS device a couple years ago from Autodesk, graphics boards from ATI and Matrox, about a hundred pens, dozens of mouse pads, a drawer overflowing with T-shirts, and the list goes on.

The gifts are nice, but most of them I give away:

* iPaq went to a friend who'd lost his (and subsequently lost the one I gave him).
* iPod went to my youngest daughter.
* That GPS doesn't display maps, so it doesn't get used.
* ATI graphics board is in my son's computer.
* Matrox graphics board in on the shelf, because technology and drivers quickly go out of date.
* Logitech WebCam didn't work, but maybe my middle daughter can get it to work.
* I keep the pens, because I am a pen collector.
* I don't use the free mouse pads, because none of them have the hump for resting my palm.
* And a landscaper friend gets a lot of the T-shirts.

As you can see, most of the loot gifts end up elsewhere -- regifting, as it were.

With non-CAD bloggers now reporting when they get loot, will CAD bloggers follow suit?

Update

More on what B. L. Ochman calls Edelman's lapse in ethics: Edelman Has New Ethics Scandal Brewing With Microsoft's Blogger Bribe Campaign.

Comments

[Tony in SV]

Oh, yes, free pens! I'm just a lowly tradeshow attendee, but I have some pretty neat tradeshow pens - the best are flashlight pens (Blaze NP Rocket Pen, Sharp Bluestreak, QC Optics multicolored, etc) - and I'm definitely not giving those away.

Hitachi High Tech America used to give away pretty cool cloth bags, but I guess they got tired of them.

--Tony

[Deelip Menezes]

And now Microsft wants them back. See http://crunchgear.com/2006/12/28/love-will-tear-us-apart-microsoft-wants-its-laptops-back/