Note: Michael Arrington has updated and made changes to the original article which removes the below quote sentence in bold. This for me was the part that I felt he overstepped the line on. It's good to see Michael regain composure and do the appropriate amount of editing. Thank you Michael! (No hard feelings)

It's a good old fashion dust-up as we'd say back home in Australia. It means that the dust is in the air, fists are flying and not allot is achieved in the end (pretty much like all fights).

It comes down to this, A Microsoftee named Dare is being hunted by Michael Arrington and it spilled over to the front page of TechCrunch.

I typically would just roll my eyes and brush it off as being two sets of ego's colliding except I saw this last finish out by TechCrunch:

This isn’t ok from anyone, and it really isn’t ok from a high profile Microsoft blogger. This is the second time Microsoft, through Obasanjo, has attacked us when we disagreed with them. No other large companies as far as I know use their employees as attack dogs to silent dissent. It’s time for Microsoft to stop this nonsense.

I'm just sitting here reading this thinking to myself, is this a joke or did I just read that?

Two points here to the last two sentences:

• Actually competitors of Microsoft do this all the time, I know of one certain competitor that wolf packs me all the time, to the point where they've made comments / threats to my family. It goes unnoticed as sure I could pickup the phone and call Michael Arrington and spill the beans, but in the end? what's the point? what good comes from it? - yet we at Microsoft are the villains in most of these little stories? (the things I've seen behind the scenes what competitors get up to, is truly amazing and something journalists continue to turn a blind eye to).
  
• The implication that we as  a company proxy our efforts through an employee to attack TechCrunch is a reckless accusation for one to throw out there. I think that was not only poor form, unfair but reckless journalism in my opinion. Where is the proof or does that not matter anymore? is it just easy to paint Microsoft as the evil villain here because it adds more color?

I tried to reach out to Michael via Twitter here's how it went down (as In the end, I'm still and always will be a fan of TechCrunch's work):

Special thanks to WinExtra.com for keeping a running note, and the full article of the below can be found here:

http://www.winextra.com/2008/10/13/arrington-heats-up-twitter/

 

At this point Mr. Arrington jumps into the conversation and Scott retires to the sidelines

I think Michael's under some stress in the end, and he just needs to move on from here. Put it behind him?