With the leak of an internal sales video, Microsoft is having its ironic cake and pretending not to eat it too. Its marketing team produced an awful spoof of Bruce Springsteen singing about Vista. One should note: Companies do this routinely to motivate their salespeople, but the innocents in engineering normally aren't exposed to the cheerleading routines. Microsoft's spin on the video: It's a gag! We're being sly! And incredibly, CNET editor Charles Cooper bought their line, quoting an anonymous flack: "They thought folks internally would get a kick out of not taking themselves so seriously all the time."

There you have it: Microsoft gets to produce an awesomely cheesy video to pump up the sales troops — but in a way that lets them pretend to be air-quotes cool, resistant to such straightforward come-ons. PR then strategically leaks it, lets the blogosphere react predictably, and finds a gullible square of a tech reporter to declare victory on Microsoft's behalf.

Gizmodo has it right: Why is Microsoft wasting money on staging fake concerts? To which I'd add: Why are they then thumping their chests about how they "fooled" bloggers? Unembarrassed, Microsoft is now challenging competitors to make an even more ironic-fake-bad-but-not-really video. To see the Microsoft spin machine at work on such a worthless cause should give Google new hope.