04.02.08
The Full Story About Finland Might Reveal an ‘Inside Job’
Some months ago we spotted and documented a long series of strategic 'donations' which Microsoft made in countries on the verge of adopting GNU/Linux. One of the first countries in this series was Finland. Some more details now emerge from the Finnish press [thanks to a reader for the pointer]. The highlight below is ours.
Prime Minister’s former aide arranged Microsoft donation to Finnish schools
Mikko Alkio, the new State Secretary at the Ministry of Employment and the Economy, who had previously served as aide to Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (Centre), was a key instigator of a donation from Microsoft of computer software to Finnish schools.
Alkio was still working as manager for information society relations at Microsoft a couple of weeks ago when Prime Minister Vanhanen visited the United States.
During his US visit, Vanhanen met with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who promised Finnish schools a free package of the Windows Live@edu service platform.
As far as Finland and OOXML go, where does one even start? We recently put together some links and looked well beyond just OOXML.
“Employees that come from Microsoft sometimes pay a favour to their former employer.”Microsoft employees must always be considered, if not carefully tracked as they hop from one company onto another. Novell, Yahoo, XenSource, Nokia, Vodafone, the BBC and many others ought to have taught us some lessons. Employees that come from Microsoft sometimes pay a favour to their former employer. It would not be far-fetched to assume that Microsoft lets some employees go for strategic reasons too, in order to have an effect in governments and rival companies. The latter is less probably, but that’s just how the story goes.
We probably will require thus article in the future, its use being an example of possible ‘inside jobs’ at a national level. █
Needs Sunlight said,
May 25, 2008 at 10:15 am
This leads to the question if there can be a place (besides the grave yard) in tomorrow’s Information Society for today’s MFSTers.
As a group, they have a history of promoting the MSFT agenda even to the direct harm of their new employers and, in some cases, countries.
While we’re on the example of Finland, which is far from alone in this wave of white-collar crime, we see that the head of Finnish broad casting came directly from MSFT. Note that, according to his CV, he is not even in the same league as the many highly skilled and experienced candidates that were passed over for the position. Under his tenure, YLE’s webcasting has gone from being platform independent to being fully locked into MSFTianism. Also the transition from analog to digital broadcast television has been such a fiasco that questions are being raised if it is done on purpose in order to promote investment in TV over IP instead — which is locked into … guess who?
Roy Schestowitz said,
May 25, 2008 at 10:23 am
I believe that the UK and Greece have similar problems at the moment. In the case of the BBC, for example, a former Microsoft senior (media unit) took over shortly after those antitrust ruling that he attended in Europe (sheer abuse against RealNetworks, with very ugly ‘smoking guns’).
Italy seems to have escaped recently, as did New Zealand (Microsoft DRM backfiring). It’s a global things which Groklaw too highlights at time. Microsoft really, really wants to dominate media (steal online video from Google, music from Apple, IPTV from everyone). Silverbullet is part of this dangerous scam and represents a vector that’s Web based and thus harder to escape and avoid.