I'll take all the karma burning you can dish out, I've got lots to spare, but calling them "Douchebags" for donating 100k is over the top.

I don't know if it's more ridiculous to think that anyone who uses Twitter or Bing need to be made aware of the destruction in Japan, or that someone honestly believes Microsoft thinks there are such people.

Microsoft executives. They can honestly believe (to the extent of sustaining that under oath) whatever they want.

Disingenuous. I was clearly referring to the non-apology. And for that you get a nozzle.

/e: the parent poster edited his post. In the original version of his post, he asked whether anyone who criticizes bing has donated 1% of $100k.

Is any public corporate humanitarian donation a marketing stunt by your definition? Should corporations keep these things secret? That seems like nonsense to me.

Not every public corporate humanitarian donation is a marketing stunt. I guess it would have been perceived very different, had they just announced that they donated a $100k instead of making the amount that they are going to donate a function of retweets. Just imagine them tweeting "Bing just donated $100k to help the people in Japan. Join us at http://blabla to find out what else we can do."?

I think the idea was for the $1 donation to be an incentive for people to retweet, which would spread the link to the Microsoft Disaster Response page.

I would find it more acceptable, yes. Not asking people to retweet in order for them to donate UP TO $100K would be more honorable.

There are noble ways to get 100K retweets. This is not one of them.

I didn't retweet and felt a bit guilty. I didn't want to be used either.

Anyway, as soon as you challenge the "realness" or validity of a specific apology, it brings up the issue of what the purpose of an apology really is, especially an impersonal apology from a major corporation. To me, an apology is not necessarily an admission of guilt. An apology is an expression of regret.

What would you propose to be a "real apology" in this case? Do you want Bing to tweet out that they purposefully did this to slight the victims of the tragic earthquake and get retweets? Do you think that would be honest?

edit: typo

And any old regret will do? How about regret for the action? They might as well express regret that there wasn't enough mayonnaise on the sandwich they had for lunch.

Remember, people choose for themselves what they find offensive. If you do something with good intentions, and someone chooses to be offended, it's reasonable to regret their response to your action, but there's no reason to regret the action itself.