10.21.09
Microsoft Lies and Lies… and Its Press Sources Help It
Summary: Microsoft accused of dishonestly inflating SharePoint figures; the Microsoft-sponsored press continues to only cover what’s favourable to Microsoft while discarding the rest
MICROSOFT’S ubiquity depends a great deal on lies and deception, such as benchmark fraud which sometimes has it exposed, sued, or threatened with a lawsuit. According to this article from a Microsoft-oriented reporter, Microsoft may be deceiving the public about SharePoint, which has its share of problems [1, 2]. From the article’s tiny critical portion:
Teper also strongly denied a more serious charge that had been floating around the analyst community: that Microsoft allocates discounts given to buyers of the Enterprise CAL Suite mostly to products such as Windows Server, Exchange or System Center Configuration Manager, rather than to SharePoint, aiming to pump up SharePoint’s revenue to demonstrate the software’s momentum.
A careful look reveals the usual mouthpieces like IDC defending these fake/inflated numbers. We mentioned IDC’s practices in the previous post.
Another important pattern of faking Microsoft numbers is the pretension that only the United States counts. We see this all the time in US-only search engine statistics [1, 2, 3], US-oriented Web meters for browser and operating system market share [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], US-only sub-notebook operating system figures, and US-only console counts. As we showed some weeks ago, Xbox 360 ranks only 5th in Japan (that’s right, fifth!) but Microsoft-sponsored Web sites like TechFlash still concentrate on US-only figures where the Xbox 360 fell behind Sony’s PS3 (in its very own back yard).
PS3 No. 1 in U.S. for first time
[...]
Sony dropped the price of the 80GB PlayStation 3 by $100 to $299.99 in August, and introducing a new PS3 “Slim,” with a 120GB hard drive, for the same price.
Why won’t these Microsoft Web sites show just how badly Microsoft is doing outside the United States? Maybe because they are not objective, and they were never designed to be objective. See the Vista 7 marketing blitz for details. News sites have become Microsoft’s whore for a week or two. Microsoft spends a lot of money buying good press. █
