Surprise, surprise… Dave didn’t get a laptop from Microsoft. Also unsurprisingly, this really upset him: “How does it feel? Shitty.”. In fact, he feels so bad about it that he thinks it’s one of the worst marketing ideas of 2006. Poor thing.
He also floated a theory that he didn’t get one because he doesn’t say enough nice things about Microsoft. Heh.
How about this for a theory: someone at MS took a few hours to read through some of Dave’s posts where he struggles with simple, simple software… so simple that myraid children and computer idiots can work it with ease… and complains that it’s the software’s fault that he didn’t figure it out.
Maybe they didn’t care for the fact that every time he couldn’t figure something out (which we can assume would be “all the time”) instead of trying to figure it out, he’ll post about how hard it is, ask his readers for help, and then when they show him that it’s really simple he will come up with some excuse as to why it was still MS’s fault.
In short, until someone comes up with a mind-reading algorithm I can’t imagine anyone paying for Dave to review their software.
Since Dave isn’t shy about how much money he has, perhaps they just decided he could afford his own laptop and didn’t need a handout?