03.12.10
Microsoft Pays for Linux Phones to Redirect Users to Microsoft
…and carriers take the money
Summary: Microsoft spends a lot of money ensuring that it becomes the only gateway to misinformation to more people, even users of Linux
Microsoft is losing over $2 billion per year because of its failed efforts on the Web (this cannot carry on until the debt grows too big). If the reports are true, Microsoft pays Verizon half a billion dollars not to let customers use Google [1, 2] and instead deliver to many people Web results that Microsoft doctors to deceive people and promote its own agenda. If Microsoft controls information, the company believes it can also control the minds and affect coverage about itself. Microsoft has quite a PR army which it built over decades of rogue operations that required a lot of spinning, denial, and harassment of journalists.
The sad thing is that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has already decided [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] that it’s okay to send users to Microsoft’s Web profiling (spying) algorithms and warped search results that are hostile towards Ubuntu, by design. This is not a violation of any law, but it is clearly a violation of ethical guidelines (not that Microsoft ever cared about ethics).
According to this new report, Microsoft must have paid Motorola a lot of money to redirect users of Android (Linux) to the same trap Ubuntu users will be sent to by default.
Motorola will start loading Microsoft’s search and map services onto its Android smartphones in China, bringing more non-Google services to the phones amid a row between Google and China.
Based on Verizon’s story, Microsoft must be sparing a lot of money here. It pays to have more users to spy on, deliver warped realities to, and exploit for a fake triumph symbolised by tiny gains in US market share (Microsoft is estimated to have ~3% market share in search worldwide). Verizon’s phones also use Linux, according to this new writeup.
A Review of Verizon’s One-on-One Droid Training
[..]
Jennifer showed me how to download a program (or app) from the Android Market that identifies what programs are currently running on your Droid.
Is having Microsoft ‘preinstalled’ on such phones any good? As we showed before, Verizon’s customers were very upset about the company’s deal with Microsoft, which prevented customers from even switching to another search engine, notably Google. Microsoft hates choice and it cannot stand fair competition. Only antitrust regulators with threats of billions of dollars in fines can change this (and even then, Microsoft fails to comply properly [1, 2, 3, 4]). Customers should not sit back idly. █
“Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.”
–Napoleon Bonaparte
“The only thing necessary for the triumph [of bad] is for good men to do nothing.”
