02.22.09
Bizarre ‘Marketing’: Microsoft and Novell
“Television to brainwash us all and Internet to eliminate any last resistance.”
–Paul Carvel
“NOVELL does a Waggener,” explains one reader who refers to Microsoft’s giant spinner that was mentioned before in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. Specifically, the reader is referring to this bit of news about Novell hiring more PR firms to redo its public image, having recently hired one which is based in Yorkshire, England [1, 2]. So here is the latest firm whose job will be to deceive the public:
Hotwire wins Novell EMEA PR Brief
Hotwire, the international technology PR agency, today announced its appointment as the EMEA agency for Novell, a global leader in data centre, end-user computing and identity and security management solutions. The Novell pan-European account will be lead by Hotwire director Andy West and will be represented by an account team of over 25 across the region.
This is also covered in a site which is called PR Week.
Hotwire has secured a six-figure brief with global software company Novell, following a competitive pitch.
More information can be found here.
In addition to these public perception management firms which Novell is spending money on (while sacking or neglecting GNU/Linux developers), the company is tossing its commercials into YouTube. We saw many such examples about a week ago and the YouTube account called “Novell” has just added the following videos:
- Office Depot and Novell
- San Diego School District
- Atos Origin
- Vodacom South Africa
- Copenhagen Business School
- Liverpool in Mexico
- University of Capetown
Novell’s PR blog has already acknowledged doing all this. They are trying to flood the Web with material that’s favourable to Novell, but they don’t use advertising space; instead, they exploit all sorts of ‘social networks’ to sneak in imposed ignorance, free of charge.
They don’t pay for it, so one can easily fall victim to the impression that this is a grassroots effort.
Microsoft too has thrown its viral marketing for OOXML into YouTube, but that’s not all. Rob Weir thinks that he found a lot more and it does not come from bribed journalists [1, 2] for a change.
Let’s start with the “Wet Paint Body Notes” blog, newly created, with only three posts. One is called “Microsoft Gets Foot in Mass. Office Door”. It starts:
In what could be a coup inwardly favour of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and a biff to the friendly wellspring league, the stipulate of Massachusetts personal added Microsoft’s Office Open XML norm to its document of give your declaration standards it will allow for elected representatives exploit.
This is a strange kind of English. It almost seems like a poor translation, or even a poor machine translation, of a document written in another language. But if you poke around a little, you find the this blog post is an unattributed garbled derivation of a 2007 article in Linux Insider. Not only was the original article in English, the reposted version truncates the article, posting only the first few paragraphs.
So what’s up with that? There are no banner ads or other obvious sources of revenue on the garbled version of the article. It is not a link farm. In fact it has no outgoing links. So why did someone bother?
Another example. The blog “75Software-News48″ has an new article “Microsoft shows support for ODF”, posted just two weeks ago, with the intro:
Amid organization hassle surrounded by wish of interoperability, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) protected Thursday announced the discovery of the Open XML Translator Project. The overhang will fry in the air permitted software to allow Word, Excel and PowerPoint to knob documents in contrary technology format.
Again, this reads like it is a poor translation from another language. But look further and you can find that the original article is actually in English, from a 2006 TechNewsWorld article.
Again, no obvious intent here. It isn’t a link farm, and there is no evident source of revenue. It isn’t informative and it certainly isn’t timely. So why did they do it?
One more example this time a LiveJournal blog called “All Microsoft”, again newly created, with a post called “Ecma Approves MS Office Format, IBM Dissents”. It opens:
Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Open XML bureau software format, broad of via the tech giant to chase near the Open Document Format (ODF), cleared a standards hurdle this week, successful approbation from the Ecma global standards article.
Same modus operandi here. Original source, unattributed, is from a 2006 Linux Insider article.
Given the Web shenanigans (spam techniques) that Microsoft or its ecosystem resorted to in order to promote OOXML, not to mention the fact that Microsoft bribes bloggers for positive coverage, one cannot help thinking of what the company calls “Effective Evangelist” [1, 2]. Those who are familiar with this confidential material have already realised that there is no level too low for Microsoft to stoop to. Microsoft even writes fake letters on behalf of dead bodies to support itself [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It also enjoys what we refer to as "OOXML shills", not just professional goons inside ISO. █
David Gerard said,
February 22, 2009 at 8:47 am
I’ve seen a lot of spam blogs do this. Word salad is too obviously spam, so they get any old text and run it through a translator and back again. The result almost makes sense. Quite a few have been hitting old Linux news sites.
Appropriate response: report as spam blog.