Journalists currently under heavy barrage from Microsoft marketing (outsourced and in-house)

Summary: Bad news for Microsoft shortly before the marketing extravaganza served to cover much of it up

IF YOU believe the hype (Microsoft has been talking about it for nearly 2 years), you will easily believe that Vista 10 is the return of Windows monopoly and supposed OS 'leadership', even though Microsoft is shrinking along with its notorious back doors and criminal behaviour (less Microsoft means less crime).

Those of us who have watched Microsoft closely for years saw a lot of the company's boosters ebbing away. Microsoft laid off a lot of marketing people. It's a 'luxury' it cannot afford anymore as breaking/infiltrating the media is not cheap. Last week we learned that Paul Thurrott left as well; he had been one of Microsoft's leading boosters and now, according to a source of ours, he "[p]robably moved to be able to change focus, adding FUD against non-Microsoft stuff in the guise of coverage. This is how far he has gone." (notice the usual and typical propaganda we have been seeing for weeks now).

Some falsely claim that Android is losing share and others try to paint Windows as running Android apps even though it cannot. That is the type of FUD we have been debunking here for years. This FUD is not dead yet. Just notice the patterns, part of the PR campaign perhaps. If many people repeat the same lie in unison, then the lie gains legitimacy. Just watch Microsoft's propaganda network 1105 Media trolling FOSS yet again over 'security' (only yesterday). A lot of this PR/FUD started last April when a Microsoft-connected firm gave a name and a logo to a bug in OpenSSL. It did it exactly when Windows XP ran out of support (i.e. left totally vulnerable to crackers).

"A lot of this PR/FUD started last April when a Microsoft-connected firm gave a name and a logo to a bug in OpenSSL."Either way, Microsoft boosters continue to be dissolved. We used to see many more FUD attacks on GNU/Linux or Free software several years ago and as Soylent News put it: "Longtime Microsoft-centric journalist and blogger Paul Thurrott has left Supersite for Windows, and the website he founded sixteen years ago, and its sister site Windows IT Pro, for reasons explained in his farewell post. The sites (the former of which is still branded 'Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows' for now, but that will surely change) will be maintained by a staff of journalists employed by Penton, an information services conglomerate."

Microsoft very much relies on propaganda agents who blame Google for Microsoft's failings and incite against Microsoft's top competitors (Chromebooks seem to be Microsoft's nightmare at the moment, not just Google Docs and ODF). Consider this rebuttal from Thom Holwerda:

First, this article makes the usual mistake of calling these vulnerabilities "zero day". They are not zero day. They are 90 day. A huge difference that changes the entire context of the story. Microsoft gets 90 days - three months - to address these issues.

The accusations against Google were repeated later, at around the beginning of last week (second time) and the end of last week (third wave). This is totally insane an accusation to make, but given that those blaming Google are longtime Microsoft boosters, one can expect it.

In other news, a new Bloomberg puff piece glamourises Microsoft privacy violations, milking the Paris shootings for Microsoft PR. What an unbelievably shallow puff piece; then again, it's Bloomberg. In similar news, Outlook has been cracked [1]. Even Microsoft cannot maintain a state of security. "Clumsily done" labelled it our source. Maybe the back doors have taken their toll in the wrong country. That won't be good for business. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Microsoft Outlook hacked following Gmail block in China

   Microsoft's Outlook email service was subject to a cyberattack over the weekend, just weeks after Google's Gmail service was blocked in China.
   
   On Monday, online censorship watchdog Greatfire.org said the organization received reports that Outlook was subject to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack in China. A MITM attack intrudes on online connections in order to monitor and control a channel, and may also be used to push connections into other areas -- for example, turning a user towards a malicious rather than legitimate website.