Dear Reader,

The elite gathering known as Davos is not an ordinary business convention. The annual conference of the World Economic Forum is an uber-exclusive event, not a meeting of governments but rather a gathering of representatives from around 1,000 member companies – the biggest companies in the world – along with a smattering of political leaders and academics.

At this year's Davos event, Microsoft hosted a party for 50 guests and invited the rock star Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, otherwise known as Sting, to provide the entertainment for the party. Estimates vary for how much it costs for Sting to show up and play at your party, but the remuneration is thought to be well in the six-figure range.

The news of this musical mixer might easily have escaped notice if Microsoft had not arisen the next day to lay off 10,000 employees. The grim layoffs, and the accompanying call to austerity, seemed oddly discordant with the extravagant excess of hiring Sting to headline a meet-and-greet, and Microsoft was quickly denounced in the tech press and social media.

I have to admit, the Sting party is an easy mark for opinion pagers like me. The optics are just terrible. But the problem with really bad ideas like this one is that everyone guffaws about how bad it is and moves on, leaving the rest of the story unexamined.

One thing about this weird and unfathomable choice is that it lays bare the unspoken truth that technical budgets and marketing budgets come from totally different universes. All kinds of money gets poured into marketing and sales that seems totally irrational to everyone else. I talked to a marketing consultant once who said she had a client who spent $1 million on a booth for a trade show, but the booth was so exotic and eye-catching that it won them $10 million in air time because the booth was featured on a national news program. (News time is way more valuable than advertising time, she pointed out.) I was at a show once and walked past a booth that looked like the bridge of a starship. I said, "Wow that really looks like the bridge of the starship Enterprise," and they told me, "It doesn't just look like it, it is the bridge of the starship Enterprise. We rented it from the studio and shipped it here." (Don't ask me to fact check that one – I'm just telling you what they told me.) And then there was the trick-riding motocross street party, with motorcycles roaring up a ramp, doing flips in the air, and roaring down another ramp, while friendly helpers dispensed hits of pure oxygen in slushy flavors like "raspberry" and "wintergreen." I've seen a Donald Trump impersonator, Maori dancers, a mechanical bull, and 6-foot-tall identical twin runway models (promoting a mirrored storage drive, as I recall) … None of these spectacles had anything to do with the products the companies were trying to sell. It was all 100 percent for the purpose of getting attention. But attention is so valuable that executives are willing to shell out unbelievable sums for seemingly pointless things.

Why exactly would Microsoft want to hire Sting to play at a party for 50 people? One reason might be because they want everyone to know they can hire Sting to play at a party for 50 people. Microsoft has always been good at projecting power and dominance. Now they aren't as powerful and dominant as they used to be, but they can still look powerful and dominant by throwing money around in ways that make it seem like their money is an endless font. Whereas to us, Sting and the layoffs seem contradictory, to Microsoft, they counterbalance perfectly, because people will say, "They laid off 10,000, which implies they don't have enough money, but look at all this money they threw down on Sting, so maybe they really are still rich and powerful after all." The problem with this approach is that, despite what the C-suite executives in the company might think, people never did really like Microsoft's power-and-dominance act in the first place, and it is even more annoying if you have to base it on trick mirrors and gimmicks.

The other thing to know is that the kind of people who show up at Davos are really hard to talk to anywhere else. It is very difficult to catch the CEO of a company that does $5 billion per year in business on an elevator. Think of all the computer services that a $5 billion business could buy. Of course, nobody actually inks a service deal at this kind of event. They just make "connections," so the next time the CEO is in a board meeting and there is a question about the IT infrastructure, he can say "I know a guy at Microsoft. Let's call him …"

If hiring Sting leads to a deal with even one of those 50 guests, it was probably worth it financially. But all the machinations on Mount Olympus have little meaning to the 10,000 workers who lost their jobs the day after the Sting soiree. Layoffs are inevitable in the high-tech industry, but a little respect for the dignity of those 10,000 workers would have been a good thing too. In fact, it might have even been good marketing.

Editor in Chief, Joe Casad