04.20.08
Tarnishing a Brand with Corruption to Earn a Marketing Tool
Corruption is bad for marketing but marketing can hide corruption
It is no longer a secret that Microsoft’s brand is has slid down the gutter because various independent (and very recent) surveys were conducted to show this. Microsoft was seemingly the fastest-sinking brand and was also one of the fastest-sinking places to work for. It is a reputation well earned for forcing products and specifications down people’s threats using bribed journalists, corrupted 'analysts', compensated standard 'experts', paralyzed CIOs who replace those who got bullied out of their job and OEMs whose contracts practically forbid them from serving anything but Microsoft Windows on brand-new PCs.
“The OOXML scandals serve as an example of cases where Microsoft goes too far and now risks an embargo in a very major continent.”Being aggressive might lead to ‘success’, but this type of aggression — if not careless violation of the law — by no means makes one popular (nor is it sustainable), no matter how much self-praising publicity money can buy.
The robber baron dilemma [1, 2, 3, 4] means that compensation has its limits and mere donations don’t heal the wounds. It’s just a form of brainwash, but not everyone is as foolish as required by those who orchestrate the propaganda to manufacture consent. The OOXML scandals serve as an example of cases where Microsoft goes too far and now risks an embargo in a very major continent.
Many would ask themselves, “what was it all for?”
According to Tim Bray, whose "ISO fantasy" was mentioned the other day, OOXML is just a marketing tool. We already knew that and Pandu Rao wrote an article about it.
Microsoft is still trying to strike balance between bad behaviour and marketing, hoping that the latter will be sufficiently effective in eclipsing the former. Put simply, Microsoft knows that it can get away with a lot of misconduct as long as the less informed public is not aware of it.
Here is the new article about Bray’s assertion.
The developer of XML and a former International Organization for Standardization committee chair have both claimed that Microsoft was interested in having Office Open XML accredited as an international standard in order to forward the company’s wider interests.
Tim Bray, the writer of XML, wrote in his blog on Thursday that Microsoft pushed for its Office Open XML (OOXML) standard to be accredited by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) so that the software giant could use the accreditation as a “marketing tool”.
It is worth stressing again that Tim Bray, sometimes referred to as father of XML, only days ago acknowledged that the ISO process was “corrupt”, to use his own words. This never stopped Microsoft from becoming a denier with hopeful ambitions to change public perception about OOXML (marketing) and bury the corruption stories. Standards experts will always know what happened, but Microsoft targets only the broad public that believes anything that appears in the press, especially when portrayed as good news. People love good news. █
“Let’s face it – the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey.”
–Bill Gates
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