Comment Articles

Vote early, vote often

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 09 Jan 2002 17:29 GMT

It was supposed to be just a bit of fun. As part of our package of Christmas delights, we decided to run an online poll. That was as far as the festive feeling went -- the poll was about Web services and whether you'd be using Java or .Net next year. It's a good question, and we'd like to know the answer.

Now the poll's closed, we're none the wiser. Because, while the results before Christmas were 3:1 against .Net: half the respondents went for Java while around a quarter weren't going to use either, leaving the final quarter to vote for .Net. Which matched our gut instinct pretty well. An established, open, proved system with good cross-platform potential against a new and still rather poorly understood Microsoft special? Well, what would you predict?

Post-turkey, however, things had reversed. Fully 75 percent of voters were .Net fans. Astonishing. We tried to find an explanation for such a turn-around -- were all Microsoft fans so keen on developing systems that they'd all been far too busy before Christmas to pop online? Alternatively, were Java kids more prone than most to Christmas cheer, so they were all too drunk and incapacitated over the holiday period to put finger to keyboard?

Fortunately, you don't have to guess in this game. You can look at the logs. And the logs showed mischief abroad: mischief, in fact, in the Pacific North-West seaboard of the United States. There were vote-stuffing scripts running, evidence of an email campaign, multiple voting... and most came from or were linked to the microsoft.com domain.

Blimey. We took another quick poll in the office: 33 percent of people weren't surprised, 25 percent were surprised, but only that we ever thought any online poll about Microsoft wouldn't get hopelessly skewed, and the remaining 42 percent just laughed that so many Microsoft employees had no idea about how Web logging worked.