02.21.10
Office Watch: Microsoft Smears Google Apps in Videos, Biased Articles, ODF-hostile Dialogues
Summary: Microsoft is still attacking its competition rather than focus on its own products and comply with industry standards
Microsoft — like Novell [1, 2, 3, 4] — uses YouTube to promote its products and to spin/lie (e.g. about OOXML), but according to the following two reports, Microsoft also uses YouTube to disparage its competition. Microsoft not only sues Google and resorts to whisper campaigns; right now it has employees going out there to smear a rival of Microsoft’s biggest cash cow (and one of the very few products that are profitable):
The Irony of Microsoft’s Anti-Google Apps Campaign on YouTube
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In a Microsoft video extolling its virtues, the narrator makes the point that marketing is difficult with Google Apps. It’s far simpler with Microsoft Office.
So we find it deliciously ironic that Microsoft is marketing a number of anti-Google Apps videos using Google’s YouTube. Hmm…doesn’t that defeat the point a bit?
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It all feels like a company protecting its power base more so than embracing the current disruption in the market.
Also:
Microsoft Attacks Google Apps … on YouTube
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They’ll let anything onto YouTube these days. No, I’m not talking about the millionth video featuring a squirrel lip-syncing to Right Said Fred, but a set of Microsoft-created videos attacking Google Apps. I guess Google, which owns YouTube, really has no inclination to censor anything aside from content that violates copyrights; but watching the Microsoft videos play out next to that YouTube logo is like watching promos for a TV show like “Dexter” (produced by Showtime) playing on HBO or another rival channel.
Microsoft sometimes uses former employees from the Office group in order to do the smearing/belittling of Google Apps and the Microsoft-paid blog called TechFlash is now giving a platform for a former Microsoft employee (“He worked in Microsoft’s Information Technology Group in the early 1990s,” says the bottom part) to do the same type of things. This control of the press is a subject that was demonstrated in the previous post and one which we’ll return to later.
It’s easy to see why Microsoft is so concerned. First it was ODF and now it’s Google Apps. One dismantles Microsoft’s lock-in using open formats that everyone supports and the other challenges Microsoft’s core business model. Microsoft's old friend, Dina Bass from Seattle, has just disseminated this Microsoft narrative which she originally published in Bloomberg:
Microsoft Corp. President Stephen Elop is preparing for the biggest shakeup to the $19 billion Office business in a decade as the company races Google Inc. to sell Internet-based programs.
The article is imbalanced and Google is hardly quoted at all (even though it’s a subject of the article). It reads almost like an advertisement for Microsoft. Speaking of which, Microsoft already advertises a product that’s not even available (Office 2010) and someone sent us this screenshot of a new dialogue, which he described as “Satan’s talk with Jesus, at the desert.” As usual — and as we have expected all along — Microsoft sells people the illusion that ODF is defective. Microsoft doesn’t even implement it properly [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].█
Robotron 2084 said,
February 21, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Satan’s talk with Jesus at the desert? Much like Twitter’s “pile of bodies” comment, this remark is so far off from realty that sometimes I wonder if this website is just a satirical joke. What the dialog says is perfectly normal and rational. Obviously, not all of the features Microsoft put into ‘their’ software are supported by an outside format. That’s logical. A person would be mighty angry if they saved their document to an incompatible format and they lost hours of work.
Gee…. if I save my document as a plain text file I get a warning that the formatting and graphics will be lost. Is that some kind of evil trick by Microsoft to push their formats on me? Please. I’d love to see Roy’s version:
() – Click here to OpenXML, an evil, pusdo-open format created by a convicted monopolist. This format is tantamount to slavery and only immoral fools would use it.
() – Click here to use ODF, the only format that protects your freedom. You should be ashamed of using non-FOSS, but at least your documents will be safe when FOSS put all proprietary software companies out of business.