Why Did Microsoft Stop Chasing Small Corrections?
Frank X. Shaw says Microsoft stopped chasing every small correction because the effort does not scale. Too many incorrect things sit out there, and a communications team would spend a hundred percent of its time playing whack-a-mole. A correction request can also make the story worse when a reporter publishes a correction or does not, or says the company is trying to silence them, and a fresh news cycle starts.
The test is whether a line is irritating or damaging. A factual error that matters has to be corrected, because Microsoft cannot let it persist. Disliking a word does not make the word wrong.
Years earlier, one of Microsoft's spokespeople hated the word woo in a Bloomberg story by Dina Bass. The published line was that an executive wooed customers. The objection was that he wooed his wife and did not woo customers, and that the executive had never said the line. The word was hers, a paraphrase, and the editors left it unchanged. The executive's name was not given until GeekWire's interviewer identified him as Kevin Turner, a former Sam's Club executive and longtime Microsoft COO.
