Well if you want to go down that rabbit hole, if MS is willing to do unethical advertising for its gaming console, how much of an extra effort would it be for them to pay people to defend its dubious practices on the internet?
It's not the first time this has come up, and I bet they've done similar things for their other software in the past. As you could read in the article, they know how to cover their butts quite well, as such it's immensely hard to prove, but iirc, Mark Penn used to run a company called Burston-Marsteller that went quite far in the Microsoft evangelism (shilling).
It's downright disgusting and misleading. Market your stuff until the cows come home, but don't try to act as if it's organic interest while it's actually a paid product placement, which is exactly what's happening here.
That's intentional misdirection, bribery wrapped in an NDA. I hope the FTC takes interest in such blatant disregard of ethics in marketing. Microsoft may be big, but it has to play by the rules too.
And no, it's not okay because some other firm does it.
I don't get how Microsoft tries to play the angel of ethics when throwing mud at other companies, but doesn't really respect its (potential) customers when it comes to their own PR.
Nobody is "okay" with it but everyone is influenced by it and there's nothing you can do. If there's a company with a large marketing budget then you can bet a good portion of that budget goes towards making themselves look good and their competition bad, because that's what everybody is doing.
