[paulcole]

> At MS some department (marketing, sales, product managers, devs?) somehow coordinated a bunch of press leaks (not sure how these were even determined to be 'leaks'), made sure that media outlets collectively believed that they were problematic, and then used those leaks to influence sales?

You’re literally describing a thing that exists which is called public relations. I’ll admit it is unlikely for the call to be coming from inside the house, but this would be the exact kind of thing done by an agency contracted by Microsoft — for among other reasons, plausible deniability should anything become public. “Microsoft would never badmouth Zoom.”

> media outlets were keen to cover stories around Zoom

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a field of professionals who make media outlets more keen to cover stories around a certain topic?

[blahblah12]

So we’re suggesting a 3rd-party PR firm likely coordinated public criticism about Zoom, an app that was undergoing hyper growth and entered the public consciousness in 2020 due to WFH and COVID. We don’t think media outlets would likely have wanted to voraciously cover Zoom stories because Zoom became one of the most widely used apps out of nowhere?

The logic appears to be: I saw a lot of news stories about X, therefore X was caused by Y, without recognizing that Z is just as likely a cause for X.

[paulcole]

I was more making the point that you seemed unaware of the concept of public relations and instead thought that Microsoft developers would take the initiative to sow the seeds of Zoom discontent themselves.