The ethics of an Internet-ready oven. Ultimate Edition.

So I’m typing away on a design document today when I see the following story crawl through the RSS reader:

Bribing Bloggers by Joel Spolsky

It was basically a post bashing another one at Robert Scoble’s blog.

Which lead to another post at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s blog.

All this revolves around the question of whether it is ethical to give bloggers free laptops with Windows Vista installed on them. I suppose Microsoft was looking for some good grassroots reviews or something, but the blogging community wasn’t going to stand for it. Because, you know, free stuff is bad. I guess. The poor guys just can’t win.

Now if they were offering free ovens, that’s something different entirely.

*Waits for audience to catch up from that tangent from left field.*

*Shuffles feet*

*Looks out window*

See, last night I was trying to make a pizza. I even had the kid (2 years old) helping me by putting the pepperoni on. This means I’m either a great Dad by being involved with my child or I’m using cheap child labor. Looks like I can’t win either.

When I went to put the pie in the oven I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t getting hot as quickly as it should have. A quick examination showed the top heating coil working great, but the bottom one was ice cold. Of course the big burned out gap/hole in the coil might have had something to do with that.

We’d been waiting on this thing to die for years and thus I find myself in the market for a new oven.

Now what I need Microsoft to do is to install Vista on a new oven and send it to me for review. It doesn’t even need to be Ultimate Edition or have a good usability score or whatever that stuff means. As far as I’m concerned if it gets hot on the inside we pretty much have a winner. I’ll even change the name of the blog to something catchy like:

“I proclaim that I’ll disclaim that Microsoft sent me an oven because of my blogging fame.”

And since Vista supports IPv6 that means that the old Toshiba vision of the “every appliance should have an IP address” would work smoothly. Actually, that would have been an awesome feature for my dead oven. Could you imagine the messages it would have sent to me as it was dying?

“Warning: Oven heating non-optimal”
“Warning: Oven heating non-optimal”
“Warning: Ventral heating coil not functioning correctly.”
“Critical: Oh sweet Kenmore, I’m dying.”
“Critical: I can’t feel my lower coil.”
“Critical: It’s getting dark in here. I’m so sleepy.”
“Critical: Is anyone there?”
“Fatal: Dammit”

Anyhow, I’ll be waiting for the package in the mail.