06.15.09

How Microsoft Got Rid of Judge Jackson After He Had Called Microsoft “Criminals”

Posted in Antitrust, Law, Microsoft at 3:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“No other large companies as far as I know use their employees as attack dogs to silen[ce] dissent. It’s time for Microsoft to stop this nonsense.”

–The Prickly Prince From Microsoft Strikes Again

Summary: A trip down memory lane of smear campaigns

Microsoft’s smear campaigns are an issue well understood to us. There is a lot of evidence out there, e.g.

Windows DRM: A Response to the Disinformation (Peter Gutmann)
Life Is Complicated (Tim Bray)
Intimidation (Pamela Jones)
Ethics (Pamela Jones)
A Microsoft Slur in the OOXML Saga — Did I Tell You or Did I Tell You? (Mathew Holloway)
Microsoft Says Worker Wrote Smear of Rival

We also wrote some posts on the subject, e.g.:

For future reference, a reader has suggested that we add the Jackson example. The reader explains: “You’ll notice that over time Microsoft people have been able to attack critics to the point that anything other than praise is a target nowadays.”

Here are some of the rulings/documents from Judge Jackson:

“Even ten years ago,” explains the reader, “Microsoft people responded to facts by attacking the messenger.” He offers the following as proof:

“The government is not trying to destroy Microsoft, it’s simply seeking to compel Microsoft to obey the law. It’s quite revealing that Mr. Gates equates the two.”

–Government official

Microsoft’s contempt for the legal system/s is a subject we’ll return to later today, in reference to news.

More judges are given as examples in this context.

“Interesting,” says our reader, that “this Jan 8, 2001 article referred to below is locked away in the archives”

Among the examples, in the Jan. 8 issue of The New
Yorker, Jackson said Microsoft founder Bill Gates “has a
Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an
arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success,
with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.” He
added that company executives “don’t act like
grown-ups!”

“Frustrating,” is how the reader describes it, adding this BBC reference which says:

“[Gates] has never been accused of causing bloodshed on a
scale associated with the French general [Napoleon]…”

“… until now,” alleges our reader. He refers to the human damage caused by bad engineering.

“He refers to the human damage caused by bad engineering.”Finally, writes our reader, ” Your articles on Windows worms in the hospitals point out that the deaths have begun. Figure each worm per hospital causes a handful of deaths, multiplied by now thousands of hospitals which are infected with Windows and multiplied again by a dozen or so Windows worms outbreaks and you quickly have casualties of not so insignificant proportion.

“We appear to have a major, ongoing industrial disaster being ignored by the militaries, defense departments, intelligence and even private insurance agencies. It Microsoft that big of a cult that normal laws and guidelines do not apply?”

Harsh words? You decide. █

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A Single Comment

Needs Sunlight said,

June 15, 2009 at 8:09 am

“It’s time for Microsoft to stop this nonsense.”

B.S.

It’s not some nameless, faceless corporation doing the dirty deeds, it is regular people with names, faces, families and jobs. They are the ones screwing us over in the name of their movement.

It’s past time for this nonsense to stop but if Microsoft were going to stop it would have stopped already or not even have started the nonsense in the first place. No. Time is passed and there needs to be intervention by law enforcement or the military if necessary taking into account the scope of the problem and its harm to the country (pick one, any one).