Microsoft hearts Hillary; Google and Yahoo, Obama...Tech Sector loves Ron Paul

From Wired:

Microsoft employees have donated a total of about $130,000 to Clinton, far more than any of the other six major candidates, according to a searchable database of the political donations at Fundrace, a project of the Huffington Post.

At Google, donations favored Obama over the New York senator by $97,771 to $46,610.

Yahoo staff also donated more money to Obama's campaign by almost two-thirds.

The only Republican presidential candidate who received a significant amount of monetary support in the tech sector was libertarian Ron Paul, who brought in over $104,000 from Silicon Valley workers.

The Hillary-Microsoft and Yahoo-Google-Obama binary also reminds me of an article form the New York Times the other day asking, Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?

On one thing, the experts seem to agree. The differences between hillaryclinton.com and barackobama.com can be summed up this way: Barack Obama is a Mac, and Hillary Clinton is a PC.

That is, Mr. Obama’s site is more harmonious, with plenty of white space and a soft blue palette. Its task bar is reminiscent of the one used at Apple’s iTunes site. It signals in myriad ways that it was designed with a younger, more tech-savvy audience in mind — using branding techniques similar to the ones that have made the iPod so popular.

“With Obama’s site, all the features and elements are seamlessly integrated, just like the experience of using a program on a Macintosh computer,” said Alice Twemlow, chairwoman of the M.F.A. program in design criticism at the School of Visual Arts (who is a Mac user).

It is designed, she said, even down to the playful logos that illustrate choices like, Volunteer or Register to Vote. She likened those touches to the elaborate, painstaking packaging Apple uses to woo its customers.

Of course, none of this is really that important. It is pertinent though, as people have started to notice how much she has started dropping the name of her site lately. Pitching it at awkward time, as in her response to the last question at the CNN debates before Super Tuesday, for example. As Tim Tagaris from Open Left put it:

As an internet director, there is one reason candidates drop the URL on television, and it's not because they care if people navigate through the tubes to learn more about your positions on the issues.

It's money. And sign-ups, which equal money.

Which, in turn, makes all of this so very important considering the news that Bill and Hillary are now putting their own money into "their" campaign and many of the staffers have agreed to work without pay for the month of February because the campaign is "spending money as fast as they could raise it." Meanwhile, the Obama campaign has what people are calling the "golden faucet."