Microsoft Marketing

I recently read a blog post making fun of a Visual Studio advertisement by Microsoft. This interested me because I had seen the ad in a magazine before and thought it was funny. The ad features before and after pictures of a developer who has started using Visual Studio. Apparently Visual Studio has enabled the developer to get a better laptop, a BMW to drive, and the attention of some attractive females in his cubicle.

The blog post is from . This is a blog about open source software. So you know it was going to razz Microsoft. Essentially the author modified the ad, and pointed out the humor that ensues. It was nice to see that there were 30 responses to the blog entry. And I wanted to add my 2 cents. Unfortunately I got the following automated reply when I tried to add a response”:

“Sorry, but your comment has been flagged by the spam filter running on this blog: this might be an error, in which case all apologies. Your comment will be presented to the blog admin who will be able to restore it immediately.
You may want to contact the blog admin via e-mail to notify him.”

Now I am hoping that a human will review my response. It was actually a meaningful reply that was not spammy in the least. A human should be able to detect this. My first thought about being rejected by spam filter was maybe due to the fact that I have black hat in my e-mail address. Then I started thing some more. I am a Microsoft developer. In other words I am pro-Microsoft. Maybe the blog author has written a really smart spam filter that blocks out posts that are not pro-open source.

To quickly determine whether my e-mail address was the problem, I submitted the same response to the blog post using another email address. This time I made sure there was no reference to “black hat” in my e-mail or home page URL. I still got the same automated response from the blog. Who knows? Maybe all responses must get approved by the blog author. Well just for that I am not linking to his blog from this post.