Looks like Microsoft's doing a little market research these days, which doesn't sound like a very unusual thing for a software company to be doing, right? Except that the Great Software Mill of the Pacific Northwest isn't asking customers what they think about their products; they're asking for opinions on "Redmond Justice" and the antitrust issues raised by America's favorite courtroom drama. Seemingly random people all over the country are receiving phone calls from pollsters trying to gauge public opinion on whether Microsoft has overstepped the bounds of antitrust law and, if so, what should be done to resolve the problem. The thing is, though, the phrasing of the questions and the construction of the poll seem just a little fishy to some people. MacInTouch has an excellent collection of information on this mysterious survey.

First of all, the questions in this roughly twenty-minute poll apparently don't touch on Microsoft's products much at all. Meaning, if you get called by these people, they probably aren't going to rank the statement "Microsoft Word 6 for the Mac was a shining example of software engineering at its best" somewhere between "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree." Instead, they want to know how you think Microsoft's doing in court; think of it as Nielsen ratings for "Redmond Justice." However, as with most public opinion polls, the people who put the thing together might be trying to skew your responses to match what they want to hear. We'll leave the question of survey bias as an exercise for the viewer, but we admit that the descriptions of the poll at MacInTouch do seem to indicate that Microsoft is pushing for data that they can use in the battle for public support.

Now, it's apparently not certain that Microsoft itself is behind this poll, but it seems pretty darn likely. What simultaneously amuses and disturbs us is the fact that the survey so closely resembles a public opinion poll that might be given by an elected official; it's the domain of the politician, not the software engineer. But then again, none of us is still kidding ourselves that Microsoft is just a software company, right? They're a world power, pure and simple, and like any world power in a crisis, their spin doctors need to know what to spin and in which direction. Still, it gives us the wiggins.