Microsoft recently announced it’s “I’M Making a Difference” campaign, whereby the donate a portion of ad revenues from every Instant Message you make using their IM platform Windows Live Messenger. You have to download the service and they get you to sign up as a customer.
Is this a cheap trick to get you to start using their IM product and serve as a gateway into other MS products? Absolutely! Is it a bad thing…not necessarily if indeed significant revenue can be raised to help some really good causes. The only problem is that it is not clear how much money will be actually raised and the 8 causes selected for donations are all well established, LARGE nonprofits. Would have been nice if they let people choose who they would like to donate to, large AND small.
Interested to see how this pans out and if it is an effective fundraising vehicle. Also curious as to who it will ultimately serve…just Microsoft or the work of some good organizations???
Microsoft recently announced it’s “I’M Making a Difference” campaign, whereby the donate a portion of ad revenues from every Instant Message you make using their IM platform Windows Live Messenger. You have to download the service and they get you to sign up as a customer.
Is this a cheap trick to get you to start [...]
Comments
@ 12:22
Well, Microsoft is all about centralizing power.
One of the points about the Gates + Buffet Foundation merger is that it’s the size of a country, but they set their own agenda without oversight. Gates Foundation “awards the majority of its grants to U.S. 501 (c)(3) organizations and other tax-exempt organizations identified by our staff.” They reiterate this on their website: “Please note that we award the majority of our U.S. Program grants by proactively identifying potential recipients. Unsolicited letters of inquiry are accepted by our Pacific Northwest initiative only.”
Further, associated with the Foundation are all the hangers-on groups - say, the 8 large non-profits they’re supporting with IM revenues? - who do what they say in order to further their own power.
It’s not that I object to the specifics of the programming; it’s that this whole idea of “trickle-down” / “1000 points of light” economics is creating an aristocracy. It’s an aristocracy that redistributes what would’ve been US tax revenues to … whatever, including foreign aid on an ad hoc basis. It’s an aristocracy that can have “socially” entrepreneurial agendas, like distributing laptops and cellphones to large markets to “enable” them.
Again, the programming may be fine, or not too bad, but the process has zero representational components.
I blogged about this a while ago, along with a hope that Gates’ has matured as a person and, in his role as a global steward, is interested in how the means affects the ends. http://kitode.typepad.com/in_situ/2006/07/forget_bill_gat.html