“This is becoming worse than a satire. It’s infuriating to some.”On to another subject — the eternal issue of Microsoft's disregard for competition — there is yet another report about Microsoft weaseling out. Microsoft gives it away in its lobbying blog and Pamela Jones over at Groklaw states that their response said ‘the EU Commission bigwigs would be at the conference, and therefore unable to take care of Microsoft: “As a result, it appears that many of the most influential Commission and national competition officials with the greatest interest in our case will be in Zurich and so unable to attend our hearing in Brussels.”‘
This is becoming worse than a satire. It’s infuriating to some.
Charged with overseeing overall management of Gazillion’s internal studios, Moulder will lead NetDevil, Gargantuan, Amazing Society and Slipgate Ironworks as they collectively continue their work on two Marvel super hero MMOs, Jumpgate Evolution and other online games both announced and unannounced.
Will GNU/Linux be among the platforms supported now that Microsoft is at the helm? █
_____ * To be more accurate, it’s not really Obama. George Carlin has a nice skit titled “who really controls America.”
From busting up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust in 1911 to going after Microsoft’s use of its Windows monopoly, antitrust policy has been an important element of the U.S. regulatory landscape.
Now, in tough times, the Obama administration is swinging back the pendulum, maintaining that lax enforcement in the past decade has worsened economic woes and hurt consumers by failing to protect business competition.
Many observers are watching closely to see how the government handles its antitrust investigation of Intel Corp. Last week, European regulators hit Intel with a $1.5 billion fine for anti-competitive practices.
[...]
Q: Besides Standard Oil, what were some other big cases?
A: Despite the nation’s antitrust policies, breaking up is, in some cases, hard to do.
In 2000, a federal judge ordered the breakup of Microsoft Corp. into two companies after labeling it a monopoly over the Windows-browser bundling issue. The Supreme Court refused to hear Microsoft’s appeal of the judge’s decision, sending the case to a federal appeals court. By 2001, Justice was no longer seeking the breakup and reached a tentative deal with the company to settle the antitrust case.
The European Union did fine Microsoft a record $613 million in 2004.
A landmark breakup came in 1984, when the Bell System — which had been a government-approved monopoly — was splintered into eight regional telephone companies and one supplying long-distance service and equipment, AT&T Inc. Deregulation of the industry under a 1996 law has enabled the reconsolidation of phone companies.
Microsoft lost its bottle? with “soft” being the operative word?
[...]
I wonder where this will leave the alleged “gifted” bloggers? I wonder if they will still shower the praise when the genie refuses to grant wishes no matter how many times they rub the lamp?
One of our readers, who used to work for Wal-Mart, says that Wal-Mart too is hiring Edelman for AstroTurf campaigns, just like Microsoft. █
Posted in Asia, Finance, Fraud at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft struggles to convince people to pay for software, then resorts to extortion and lays off many more employees
Last week we wrote about Microsoft's blackmail in China. This allegation seemed bold at the time, but it is now concurred by an independent source that says (in the headline): “Microsoft fights Chinese software piracy with blackmail”
To say software piracy and the use of counterfeit versions of Windows operating systems and products is rife in China is an understatement of colossal proportions. How can Microsoft tackle this problem, which is harming its business in the important emerging market of Asia? Blackmail.
In detail, the company slashed over 300 employees in the mainland and ten employees or so in Taiwan. Most of the employees were for the MCS, EPG, as well as Windows Live divisions, pointed out an overseas report, adding that some executives were also laid off.
Microsoft Corporation offers cooperation to Kyrgyzstan. The delegation from corporation has met with the chief of the Kyrgyz Prime Minister’s Apparat…
Steve Ballmer himself even went to Riga where he has just met the president.
President of Latvia Valdis Zatlers visited Microsoft headquarters yesterday, on May 19, to meet Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and discuss future cooperation projects of Latvia and Microsoft, the President’s Press Office informed LETA.
[...]
Minister of Culture Ints Dalderis (People’s Party) and the State Language Committee member and the IT company Tilde head Andrejs Vasiljevs also participated in Zatlers’ meeting with Ballmer.
The city council of Ogre is providing free training for OpenOffice, an Open Source suite of office applications, to improve the competitiveness of the local businesses and boost the performance of the local government.
Ogre, a town with some 27,000 inhabitants is about 30 km southeast of Latvia’s capital Riga.
Recently Ukraine government made another move toward an open source software. As anyone would expect Microsoft has something to say and something to offer.
I can’t help but translate some FUD by Microsoft Ukraine CEO Dmitry Shimkiv…
Microsoft does not like open source software. It’s only pretending because pretending is better for its business. █
“Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer [...] I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I’m an American; I believe in the American way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don’t think we’ve done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat.”
–Jim Allchin, President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft
Let’s take a quick look at some security news in order to shed light on Microsoft’s position. This one is priceless:
Malware found on brand new Windows netbook
[...]
Security vendor Kaspersky Labs found malware on new Windows XP netbook, just out from the factory. The firm is warning users to take extra precautions, and ensure virgin systems are malware free before connecting them to the Internet.
Computer virus strikes U.S. Marshals, FBI affected
[...]
Law enforcement computers were struck by a mystery computer virus Thursday, forcing the FBI and the U.S. Marshals to shut down part of their networks as a precaution.
“Computer virus,” eh?
Does that affect “computers” or just those running the program called Microsoft Windows? Why do they constantly refuse to utter this more specifically? As Glyn Moody ranted the other day, “Conficker still infecting 50,000 PCs per day – http://bit.ly/JpG1a not true: it’s infecting 50K *Windows* machines per day”
Here is more about the FBI, courtesy of CNET (Associated Press does not wish to be cited).
The FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service were forced to shut down parts of their computer networks after a mystery virus struck the law-enforcement agencies Thursday, according to an Associated Press report.
What operating system? Again, no word. This is not the place to be agnostic if the public can be educated so as to make more informed decisions in the present or future. From The Register:
US military shows off hack-by-numbers battlefield gadget
As the US military strives to boost its ability to wage cyber warfare, it’s looking for ways to make it easier for non-expert soldiers on the front lines to wreak havoc on enemy networks.
Note the emphasis on vague scare tactics and the lack of any actual data or information. This Softpedia article also spreads Kaspersky fluff, which makes me sad because I like Softpedia’s Linux news and reviews a lot. It references this Kaspersky blog entry:
“At the moment we know of around 1000 cases of sites infected with Trojan-Downloader.JS.Iframe.auy. There are also several hundred servers infected with Trojan-Mailfinder.Perl.Hnc.a and Trojan-Dropper.Linux.Prl.a, which are actively spreading spam. The days of *nix systems not being targeted by malware writers are long gone.”
Uh huh. Again heavy on scare, light on details. How do these *nix boxes become infected in the first place? What *nix boxes where? Unlike Windows, Linux and Unix do not auto-execute any random executable that happens to wander by. I did both Web searches and searches on Symantec, F-Secure, and other vendors to learn more about these big scary *nix threats, and they don’t even include them in their threat lists. A Web search turns up the blog and some Russian sites. Searching Kaspersky’s own threat list does not find anything mentioned in the blog, except variants on Trojan-Downloader.JS.Iframe.auy:
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Microsoft’s promises should be voided given that Vista 7 might be even less secure than predecessors. There is a lot of evidence already. █
ODF Alliance managing director Marino Marcich said in a press statement this week that “support for ODF represents an important and ongoing test of Microsoft’s commitment to real-world interoperability. Unfortunately, serious shortcomings have been identified in Microsoft’s support for ODF. Putting potentially millions of ODF files into circulation that are non-interoperable and incompatible with the ODF support provided by other vendors is a recipe for fragmentation.”
ODF implemented by one company is not the same as implemented by the other seven products.
There’s rumble in the web during the last days. And the reason is something to celebrate, but regrettably only for the first look. Microsoft published Service Pack 2 for their Microsoft Office 2007 product and for the first time in history they decided to officially support saving and opening in Open Document Standard (ODF).
[...]
We mustn’t let them get away with this. They should realize, that interoperability is not made by them alone, but by interacting with others, by working together and by sharing experiences. Maybe it’s time for an independent organization to test the usefulness of office documents?
# I could point to other blogs, but this one comes from Jeremy Allison, author of Samba, now working for the great Satan Google. It’s actually quite interesting because what Jeremy is saying is that all this dispute seems to be based on the impression that Microsoft did the minimum to have ODF work inside MS Office. My take on this is we should first stop getting ballistic at each other, especially inside the ODF TC. What is needed in the interest of ODF and the users, is to have a careful examination not on the ODF conformance in MS Office, but on why, based on experience, the interoperability is severely hampered when using ODF with MS Office. Based on this analysis we should be able to go forward. But don’t let this fool you: this has, I’m afraid, nothing to do with the development of ODF 1.2.
# As an interesting reminder, here’s what the European Commission was saying about Microsoft’s announcement on the support of ODF inside MS Office last year.
Well, if we’re talking about interoperability it has been done. Or tried. We could call it overunderdoing. Here’s the algorithm:
1. pick one interoperability concern
2. solve it up to 85% (percentage may vary)
3. wisely choose the 15% to leave out so interoperability can be said to work but with constant annoyances
4. make a loud announcement to the press
5. profit: everyone will read the announcement but only a small fraction of such readers will notice the missing bits; despite the claimable advances over the previous situation it still won’t be practical to make any use of the announced interoperability
No, it is not in my opinion. But I think that is what Microsoft now tries to make us public authorities think. I know about the facts behind the scenes. I know that this company declines real support for ODF by doing something strange, not aiming at real interoperability, but at a Microsoft implementation of ODF, not compatible with others. So they, as worldwide market leader, can proof the insufficiency of ODF. And they have the solution for us. Use OOXML instead. It implements every function Microsoft Office does. And the next step is, that other interested implementations should improve their products to implement everything OOXML does. Really simple, isn’t it?
More about it was published in the German press and Rob Weir says: ‘UNESCO/Sun agreement “will promote the use of open source technologies, including OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard”.’ He is referring to this joint development.
WordPress users may want to avoid Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8
[...]
That was enough for us to uninstall. Looks like IE8 may very well be what some people are already calling, the last nail in the coffin.
See the picture which shows erroneous page rendering in IE8. Someone should hold Microsoft accountable for this. Enough is enough. It’s deliberate. █
“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this.
“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”
Switzerland, being a nation of banking for the most part at least in people’s minds, thrives in trust and responsibility. Swiss citizens knew what Microsoft was up to and they responded:
Asking Switzerland for more neutrality …
[...]
Well – a lot of people in Switzerland and almost 20 companies are not really happy. Among these companies is Red Hat. So Red Hat is joining the official appeal that asks the court to stop this contract, force BBL to evaluate the alternatives that exist and are in active use, even in Switzerland in the offical way of public tendering.
Effectively the appeal asks the BBL to defend competition. In a vendor neutral way. Based on technical merits. I think it is fair to ask. Let the court decide.
And ofcourse the irony of asking Switzerland of all countries to act in a (vendor-) neutral way is quite funny.
As the above already suggests, Red Hat’s legal team is stepping in.
Red Hat is a leader of an appeal by 18 technology companies of a Swiss government agency’s award of a no-bid contract to Microsoft. The challenge raises important issues of openness in government and of a level playing field for open source and other competitors of Microsoft. Red Hat is seeking a public bidding process that allows for consideration of the technical and commercial advantages of open source software products.
There is some press coverage only from Peter Judge, but hopefully the word will spread and inspire other countries to do the same thing. It is certainly a broader issue.
£8 million a year to Microsoft, with no public bidding. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, say open source activists
Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators.
The Red Hat group has asked a Swiss federal court to overturn a three-year contract issued to Microsoft by the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics, to provide Windows desktops and applications, with support and maintenance, for 14 million Swiss Franc (£8 million) each year. The contract, for “standardised workstations”, was issued with no public bidding process, Red Hat’s legal team reports in a blog – because the Swiss agency asserted there was no sufficient alternative to Microsoft products.
For Microsoft to stoop down to these tactics of secret deals is not particularly surprising. See the following writings about Microsoft’s financial situation, which suffers from endless dumping of software and hefty fines:
DaemonFC says that “Microsoft is trying to sell debt bonds” and Twitter explains that “the $30 billion of cash had conflicts with other reports of $20 and it’s more likely they have none.”
“Microsoft is actually done with buybacks.”Further he explains: “at the end of 2008 they said they would go $20 billion in debt to buy $40 billion of their shares. Over the last couple of weeks there were a number of articles that acted like this is what they were doing. I thought they had already done their buy backs.”
Microsoft is actually done with buybacks. They announced it one month ago and it is odd because the company has purchased its stock heavily for many years. At that stage, namely the point where undisclosed buybacks are complete (their scale is disclosed, not the purchasing pace), according to their plans they would be about $5 billion in debt. Unless they cut these buybacks short, it would only make sense for Microsoft to be in debt right now. But as Twitter says, “If Microsoft is done with buybacks, why are there so many BS articles about it? [...] and this earlier article acts as if no one was sure.” To quote: “We know not why a company the size and shape of Microsoft needs to raise money through debt issuance–it already has over $30 billion in cash at hand on its books–but if this is a cost-of-capital initiative that leads to the company buying back some of its own float, shareholders may be in for a treat.”
What exactly is going on here? Someone is not telling the whole truth as there are contradictions that we are able to identify. █
“There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category. It is bad for the long-term worth of the economy.”
