Summary: Microsoft's latest PR offence which is intended to turn ex-soldiers into Microsoft soldiers and more about Microsoft's intrusion into the back yard of Red Hat

SELF-SERVING programmes that are being described as "donations" are a troubling thing and American EDGI (its euphemism is "Elevate America") is one such thing which we covered in posts such as [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Microsoft claims to be 'donating' courses to people, but this so-called 'donation' is merely Microsoft indoctrination, which does more harm than good. It makes people dependent.

Microsoft targets soldiers with its American EDGI scam, based on this poor report which parrots a talking point from Denis Leary of Veterans Inc.: “As our soldiers come home from Iraq, this is the perfect time for Veterans Inc. to expand its services in collaboration with the Microsoft Elevate America veterans initiative.”

Bellevue is also targeted by this programme and the corporate press plays along with the lies/spin (PR), discarding any opinions from sceptics. It's actually from AP, at least originally:

Bellevue College is one of six organizations nationally to receive grants from Microsoft Corp. to help pay for a program that helps veterans get jobs.

They are pretending it's a donation. What ever happened to critical or lateral thinking? It's not so hard to see what is going on here. Microsoft marketers issue some press release and IDG plays along, not to mention local news sites, which are generally most notorious for shallow and inaccurate reporting.

This is a point that we've made so many times before (repetition reduces overall signal/entropy), but just to state the obvious again, Microsoft needs the PR in order for lousy/sloppy reporters (or bloggers and Seattle minions) to deceive citizens, making them slaves of the software which Microsoft owns and controls while honestly believing that they improve their job prospects. I have seen victims of these programmes in my own eyes (some of whom were loved ones).

“Learning how to use menus of Microsoft programs is not education.”While the English coverage mostly explains the impact of American EDGI (lingual-geographic bias), this problem is global and here is a new example from elsewhere: "Kshamta, meaning capability, is a 110-hour training program consisting of 30 hours of the Microsoft Digital Literacy Skills Programme..."

"Microsoft Digital Literacy" means stuff like Windows, Internet Explorer (yes, they teach Microsoft-specific Web browsing), and Office. Learning how to use menus of Microsoft programs is not education. It's not "literacy" or "skills", either. These are just buzzwords and sound bites.

Here is more indoctrination for Microsoft, going under the heading "Free Computer Classes" towards the end of the year. Microsoft is not "computer".

Some time ago we showed how Microsoft came to Red Hat's back yard in North Carolina to turn students from the area into Microsoft drones, too. Sadly, we did not provide many references at the time (this is important news), so here is some more:

Education officials announced an agreement Monday morning that makes North Carolina the first state to provide Microsoft IT Academy online courses and instruction management tools to every public high school.

There is additional disinformation in [1, 2, 3, 4]. As we asked at the time, why is Microsoft targeting Red Hat's back yard so specifically? Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. In any case, Microsoft in education is like Happy Meal in a restaurant. ⬆

"The danger is that Microsoft is using strategic monopolistic pricing in the education market, with the government’s assistance, to turn our state university systems into private workforce training programs for Microsoft."

--Nathan Newman