Microsoft Apologizes for Anti-Drupal Ads

An anti-Drupal advertisement has been pulled from circulation after it has been made famous by Drupal community on Twitter. The ad asked web developers to "forget Drupal" and it was linking to Microsoft's last product Webspark, a Microsoft's application to web designers and developers.

Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert wrote about the ad on his blog and said "this was interesting, not because Microsoft isn't allowed to compete with Drupal but because Microsoft is also promoting Drupal". In fact, Microsoft promotes the Acquia version of Drupal on their website.

"I was flattered by the idea that Microsoft considered Drupal worthy of competition" said Buytaert.

Mark Brown of Microsoft publicly apologized for the aggressive ad and added on his blog:

First, I want to offer my sincerest apology for this. I have contacted Google and we are working on having this ad pulled as soon as possible. In addition we are working internally to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Second, I want the Drupal Community to know that Microsoft and the Drupal Community have been working together for some time now to make Drupal better on Windows. Making it easier to run Drupal on Windows is very important to us and Drupal was among the very first communities we reached out to when we launched our Web Application Gallery this year which now provides an easy means for downloading, installing and configuring Drupal on Windows.

Finally, we are indeed working to promote Drupal on Windows here at Microsoft and are running advertising in countries around the world to promote Drupal. If you are curious, I threw up a few copies of the adverts I created that we are running here in the US.