You've built quite a strawman out of something I've actually denied. Bribes. I did not say. In fact here, verbatim, is exactly what I did say, upon which YOU irrationally have built your delusional house of cards for me to prove:
"Why do you think there is a campaign from this "author of this and several recent articles that have been posted here seem to think otherwise" saying the same thing? It's an advertising meme being pushed by Microsoft's astroturfering marketing department getting their new product which is about to be released: The Microsoft Surface 4."
I noted that these writers, editorialists, and bloggers who are pushing this "Apple is copying Microsoft Surface" meme, all publishing within a couple of days of each other, if you care to look, are amazingly using the exact same phrases and words, sometimes the exact same sentences, and cite the exact same quotations. . . in the exact same order. Now either they all woke up bereft for a topic to write about and they all came to the same idea simultaneously, and somehow composed the same story in the same way, using the same outline. . . or someone with an agenda provided it to them, already written, and they filed the serial numbers off, put the by-lines on it, and submitted, posted, or published it as their work.
I spent six years doing PR work for a large chorale, I've also been the founder of a large charity and did much of the PR for that organization. If you want a particular news story to run, it's easy to get run, you write it as you want it to be seen, like a news story, usually about twice as long as it needs to be, providing lots of juicy details, send it out directly to a reporter, not the editor, and nine times out of ten two thirds of what you wrote gets printed verbatim. If you're lucky, and they're short of filler, the whole thing gets published, but you always get more than the paragraph that people get who merely submit a request for an announcement on an event or organization.
Good astroturfers don't need "bribes" or people on the payroll to generate buzz. . . because these guys will fall all over themselves with the right attention from the right people, or the right spiffs. THEY WANT ACCESS and will wiggle and wag their tales and wet the floor like a six week old puppy when they think they've got it. That's the bone they're tossed to get them to bark in the night. . . if they don't, bye bye access.
You paid absolutely no attention to what I wrote above because it didn't agree with your "bribery" strawman, which I specifically shot down. You skipped right over that, didn't you, Joe?
“Why do you think there is a campaign from this “author of this and several recent articles that have been posted here seem to think otherwise” saying the same thing? It's an advertising meme being pushed by Microsoft's astroturfering marketing department getting their new product which is about to be released: The Microsoft Surface 4.”
Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participant(s).
By it's very definition astroturfing involves paying money to certain parties to push a meme and make it appear that it's their own ideas. So once again, please provide the dates, amounts and exactly who Microsoft paid to push the “Apple is copying Micrsoft” meme. If anything both the mainsstream media and meet the tech press have been Apple fanboys for decades.