On May 1, 2005, at 8:43 AM, Gary Denton wrote:
Microsoft is playing both sides now - it is paying Ralph Reed a $20K a month retainer.
After a meeting with Rev. Ken Hutcherson, leader of a mega-church in Seattle who threatened a national Christian boycott, Microsoftie reversed its policy on supporting gay civil rights.
Thank Allah the Merciful, I would have had to support Bill if he was the subject of a Christian right boycott. I really dodged a bullet on that.
The cowardice evinced by MS is staggering in this case. They, like many in the current national legislature, have vastly overestimated the numbers of radical right-wing loonies out there. A fundamentalist boycott of MS products would dent their net by a maximum of 26% in the US, if the numbers I dug up are valid.
<http://www.religioustolerance.org/us_rel5.htm>
But there's another problem with the "boycott MS" stance: For the most part people who are using MS products already *own* them, which means the people participating in the boycott would have to stop using their PCs entirely. Not bloody likely; they have to use *something* to download all that "perverse" material so they can cluck their tongues and shake their heads woefully at how sinful *other people* are, never for once gaining any personal enjoyment from the activity, of course, of course.
Thus boycotting MS is a little like organizing a book burning. In order to burn books you have to buy them (unfortunately no one's done me or my authors that favor yet), and of course the degree of negative publicity that surfaces acts as a backlash against the right-wing loony fringe. It's a corporation's dream -- you literally cannot buy that kind of advertising.
MS fouled up. They should have stood firm. But they changed their position before that ludicrous broadcast that featured (among others) James Dobson, and so I think were laboring under the assumption that the fundies were a serious threat.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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