@skelband - explanation
Someone might well beat me to this. Who knows?
Twitter hasn't got a whole lot to do with this, other than being the medium. What's going on here is that someone within the Microsoft corporation posted a message to the Twitter site stating that for every response they received to their posting, they would donate some amount of money up to a certain value (seemingly $100,000 in this case).
Well...I'm relatively sure that they probably meant well, but here's where the problems start. For starters, how do we even know it's legitimate? E-mails purporting to be from some reputable corporation (including Microsoft, speaking in terms of legitimacy of their business, not quality of their product, so don't flame me) were sent around claiming a similar thing would happen. Only trouble is, they were completely bogus. And while their intentions might have been good, the whole part of posting it to Twitter and saying "respond to this and we'll donate" can really come across as a cheap, poorly thought out publicity stunt. I don't know that it was, and I don't pretend to pontificate in a way that would suggest I did.
That is basically the point of the article. Microsoft pulled off what could have been (and mostly was) perceived as a poor publicity stunt as opposed to just quietly supporting the recovery efforts in Japan.
By the way...just because it's been "that kind of a day"...those who are thinking that $100,000 doesn't buy a lot of cars...well, you're right. Congratulations. It could buy a lot of meals for those who don't have one, it can buy lots of cleaning supplies and many other little things that just might help a lot. I've been close enough to a disaster where the American Red Cross was involved, and I can say that their presence was an enormous help. Even though I wasn't particularly hard-hit by said disaster, I did help people who were and all of those buckets, mops and other cleaning supplies provided without reservation by the Amercan Red Cross were much appreciated.
As for these people's cars...well, I'd guess I'd say "let's just pull the engine apart, drain the water out, slap a new battery in and see if she'll go!"