If Microsoft and its founders only stopped giving billions (!) to charitable causes, this world would be a much better place. Microsoft’s donations, the B&M Gates Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, Charles Simonyi’s donations are all shameless.

Objectively speaking though, I think it’s nice to hear these large companies being involved, one way or another (whether in a method you like or not), in charity. Hopefully it does challenge you yourself to be a part of that, instead of questioning whether someone else has done it.

The point here is that MSFT is taking marketing through philanthropy to another level. They’re not the first, Yoplait has been doing this for years (http://www.yopl...r_lids_faq.aspx).

In my mind, if you’re going to do philanthropy, just do it. Don’t hold the starving children hostage until people use your product. Don’t not support cancer research until your customers send in some lids. If as a company, you have some extra cash and want to do something good with it… then just do it.

And by comparing Microsoft’s campaign to a single poster in Facebook’s cafeteria, I would argue that you are distorting and marginalizing Microsoft and its employees’ total efforts to give charitably. Ie. YOU are misleading people. Not Microsoft.

here is a good article about how in 2008 Microsoft donated almost $500 million (thats 1/2 billion).
http://arstechn...500-million.ars

not to mention facebook isnt even a sponsor of the shareyourlunch website. ebay is, along with other companies but facebook isnt. so is facebook actually putting any money towards this or are they just trying to encourage their employees to donate while they sit on their ass – now that would be some real journalism if you investigated that one.

If Microsoft and its founders only stopped giving billions (!) to charitable causes, this world would be a much better place. Microsoft’s donations, the B&M Gates Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, Charles Simonyi’s donations are all shameless.

Oh how we appreciate TC’s philanthropic ambitions.

I don’t really think MG has to be fired, but he should definitely choose between tabloïds and first-class tech journalism … this is annoying.

And hey! why do ALL my comments get deleted? Do you block users selectively?

http://www.aksh....org/limca.html

Pretty impressive stats however you look at it.

MG, I challenge you to show stats for the last 4 years and a few days, of what Techcrunch has done for charity. I put this challenge to you because talk is cheap. Action is harder.

Seriously M.G, you’re initial article should have been “Go download ie8 … even if it’s not actually usable … they’re doing something good”

or

“the charity round up, analysing the different companies’ initiatives”

but what you did is … FIRED

Seems to me they are not giving a dime.

How is the relevant? Are we still hating microsoft for giving a million dollars to help hungry people?

Second post about same MS donation issue the majority of people thought ridiculous, right again the next day – ignoring everything people rightly said.

Constant posts about Twitter even though a large proportion of the audience are irritated about it. Right now people are finally seeing that Twitter as a media tool was media hyped – and TechCrunch is as much of that as anyone. I actually enjoyed the posts, but the arrogance remains none the less. At least TechCrunch could consider implementing a category/tag filtering system with support on the RSS feeds.

Polemic posts, like the Facebook holocaust thing, restating a past position just because people are coming out on mass and disagreeing with it, turning this site into the authors own soap box.