Summary: More FUD is released by Microsoft's partners in business; we counter with facts

WHENEVER we spot fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) there is a valid reason for issuing a rebuttal. If we comes across FUD with statistics rather than fun with statistics, then we typically inform readers. It's one of this site's goals to counter disinformation, which is disseminated by PR people (it is their job to deceive people). One piece of disinformation that we noticed the other day is LAMP FUD that Pogson has already deconstructed.

Let’s see… they investigated 270 attacks on 203 million sites and they are concerned about the frequency of attacks on LAMP sites… Hmmm. That other OS runs 18% of sites and gets 19% of the attacks reported…

Yes, Microsoft is hardly used on Web servers. It is FUD from liars for hire such as IDC that leads some people to thinking that Microsoft does well on servers. It's FUD with statistics, where basically the unit measured is price, not actual units used. The metric is discriminatory by design. Those who do go with Windows for servers often suffer the consequences and even for Microsoft it has proven to be a peril because its online services go offline quite routinely. No wonder "Office 365" (maybe they should call it Office 360 for the 5 days of aggregate downtime) is such a disappointment and it continues to receive some negative reactions when the PR factor is set aside. Even Microsoft boosters talk about it.

Anyway, since we've mentioned IDC, how about this article which led to the allegation that Microsoft had paid IDC specifically for this FUD? Quoting "Dave U. Random":

Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Another (Microsoft) PAID FOR report by IDC

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Microsoft has yet again spent big bucks in a last ditch effort to rake in some mobile phone marketshare (if only virtually). This so-called report by IDC claims that Windows Phone 7 will take 20.3 percent of the market in 2015, beating iOS yet trailing Android (Linux) by a wide margin.

Most of these paid for shills are claiming that M$'s deal with Nokia will help its marketshare, with the midguided belief that every single phone Nokia sells today will one day magically turn into a WP7 sale, which is simply proposterous. Nokia's marketshare is dwindling so fast that the Redmondians can hope to gain at best 10% marketshare and there's a real good chance that Nokia won't even make it to 2015, which is an eternity away in mobile-time. If Nokia falters or gets purchased by another vendor, all these numbers will add up to nought.

WP7 is already down to 1% marketshare and still falling. Next year there will be no more Windows Mobile phones in the statistics revealing that the emperor has no clothes.

We could not find the IDC report. Even if we had, it might be somewhere behind a paywall, hiding the sponsor or commissioner or the so-called 'study'. We already know that Microsoft and its front groups pay top bucks to IDC (and to IDG for advertisements), but can anyone verify that this report was yet another one of the Microsoft-paid IDC lies? To give an example, Microsoft paid for one such IDC report to make rosy predictions about Vista just when it was released.

IDC does not care about truth, it cares about clients. Watch out for FUD from these firms who take bidding for their biases. And for those who think that IDC's lies are a victimless crime, read this. ⬆