"I calmly and politely tried pointing out that I was absolutely never told about having to show off two different states, but at this point I realized there was no point in even attempting to argue since the Microsoft Store employees clearly had no intention of even potentially discussing the possibility of considering me the winner," Katta wrote.
The story attracted lots of attention in the tech world, getting picked up on the news aggregation site . On Monday, Microsoft's Senior Manager (and self-proclaimed Microsoft Evangelist) Ben Rudolph that he wanted to make things right, and promised Katta a laptop, a phone, and an apology.
The Verge also wrote showing how Microsoft instructed store employees to avoid certain challenges against specific phones. For instance, HTC's Status has a "pocket-to-picture-to-post feature and a camera that switches on even faster than Windows Phone," according to a store guide, so employees were instructed not to challenge Status users to take a picture and upload it to Facebook.
It should be no surprise that Microsoft was stacking the odds in its favor. "Smoked by Windows Phone" is a marketing campaign, not an honest assessment of one platform's advantages against the competition. But as long as Microsoft was coaching store employees on how not to get beaten, it could have also taught them how to gracefully accept defeat.
Then again, one store's snafu arguably led to more exposure for the campaign than it ever would have received otherwise.