03.02.10
Microsoft Wants to Capture Education, Healthcare, and Citizen IDs; Uses Goldman Sachs Event as Platform to Promote This
Summary: Microsoft wants to control more aspects of people’s lives and those who enable this are identified and named
(Mis)Education
Microsoft is still exploiting the education systems for more control over the curriculum and the tools, just as it recently did with the IEEE (more on that here). Microsoft proceeds to Imperial College (London) and Washington University, based on the ‘Microsoft press’ which masquerades as academic media (1105 Media). They are advertising the Live@edu scam.
Health Vulture
Microsoft’s HealthVault uses Silverlight, so it punishes those who are not Microsoft customers, but there are worse things. For more control over people’s medical records [1, 2] Microsoft is now misusing the word "choice" and coercing HHS while unleashing press releases and attending/organising events. No medical system anywhere should allow a corporation to have private control of vital tools and patients’ data. Microsoft claims “choice and flexibility” in its press release, as long as you choose Microsoft (i.e. no choice and no flexibility). It even (mis)uses the word “open” in the title. Microsoft Nick and others have covered this [1, 2, 3], but they did not list the drawbacks or outline the deception. It’s more like ghost-writing or editing (of press releases), it’s not journalism.
India (Microsoft’s Future)
Over in India, Microsoft is to manage people's identities (it’s a scary thought) and Microsoft is still moving jobs over there. More recently it was the legal team and here is another new article about it:
Microsoft Outsources Legal Work to India Amid Budget Cuts
In a surprising move, Microsoft Inc. has inked a contract with a legal outsourcing provider to outsource to India. The provider CPA Global will employ lawyers in India to get the legal work done.
Law.com chose the headline “Tech Lawyers Say ‘Uh Oh’ as Microsoft Outsources Legal Work to India” and “India is critical to Microsoft’s strategy” says another news headline from last week. Expect more parts of Microsoft to move to India and reduce the company’s expenses.
Goldman Sachs Meets Microsoft Slime
We previously wrote about Microsoft and Goldman Sachs in [1, 2]. The ‘Microsoft press’ and the Seattle Times report from last week’s Goldman Sachs event where Microsoft promoted itself (including some of the above, namely ‘cloud’ services for government/public service to store data on Microsoft servers), with help from Microsoft booster Gavin Clarke, who is sliming Oracle by quoting Microsoft’s slurs.
Addressing Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, California, Microsoft’s server and tools chief Bob Muglia criticized Oracle for peddling a return to “1960s computing,” as the rival company goes against industry trends and backs obsolete technologies.
This is utter nonsense. Muglia has said other darn things about Free software, going back several years ago [1, 2].
If Microsoft is so future-proof as Microsoft wants people to believe, then why did Bill Gates carry on dumping Microsoft (MSFT) shares last week? He seems to be dumping these as fast as he is allowed, being an insider. This has gone on for years.
Director of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) William H Gates Iii sold 7,000,000 shares during the past week at an average price of $28.77.
He is investing in other monopolies.
Elsewhere in the World
Over in Jordan, Microsoft continues targeting the government and the business sector. Elsewhere in the Middle East Microsoft is trying to control Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Microsoft Jordan hosted a training workshop for 150 of its customers and partners on the increasing importance of effective and integrated business intelligence (BI) solutions that will help drive better decision making across organisations and government institutions, resulting in improved IT skills, reduced costs and enhanced business performance.
Here is Microsoft exploiting UNESCO again. It makes a partnership while publishing this press release to start a whole lot of media fluff.
Microsoft Corp., in collaboration with UNESCO, has launched an initiative of its own kind to save several rare languages from being lost after they have been falling victim to the ever-changing cultural landscape.
The news is missing the point by repeating sound bites from UNESCO.
“Linguistic diversity is under threat,” UNESCO director-general director Irina Bokova said in a release. “This loss not only erodes individual communities and cultures, but more broadly, the very makeup of our societies.”
It is Free software — not Microsoft — that keeps languages alive. There are many examples to that effect, but it’s not what this post is about. In general, it’s sad to see that UNESCO sometimes plays along with a convicted monopoly abuser. UNESCO was previously promoting ODF [1, 2, 3], which is about communication across platforms (multilingualism being similar). As for the language issue, last month we explained the language game Microsoft is playing [1, 2]. It’s doing this a lot in Africa and South America, but the new examples which we gave last month were all from Africa. █
“It’s possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s going quite well I must admit.”
–Bill Gates
your_friend said,
March 2, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Microsoft’s HealthVault uses Silverlight? That’s got fail written all over it. They really think people are going to dump their tried and true pdf based records systems for an entertainment system that major broadcasters have dumped as unreliable? Thanks for pointing this out, this is reason enough to reject Microsoft’s efforts. A person could have been born yesterday and realize that an experimental entertainment platform is not something that should be used for medical records. Someone familiar with Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior might expect this but only Microsoft could be stupid enough to try it.
If this does not make the mono people feel like tools, I’m not sure what will. PJ has this excellent write up on mono Miguel, Stallman and fusion with Microsoft. The scope and reach of Microsoft’s plans, impractical though they may be, is reason for the mono people to feel deep shame. Microsoft will never let moonlight work when it counts. Those that build mono, build traps for free software users because .NET was a trap all along.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:30 pm
The Silverlight part is limited. Follow the link for details.
your_friend said,
March 2, 2010 at 11:53 pm
Microsoft is actually one of the great destroyers of linguistic diversity. If computers are required for modern living and information access, Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior pushes English and other major languages onto people. Free software, of course, is the cure. Instead of waiting for Microsoft to translate their software, people can do it themselves with free software. Free software language support exceeded Microsoft’s limited abilities long ago.