AMID the latest Microsoft layoffs we are deeply bothered to see misdirection and propaganda, almost surely coordinated behind the scenes by Microsoft's 'damage control' experts. The same thing happened some months ago when Microsoft announced an even bigger round of layoffs. Microsoft is trying to blame it all on Nokia, which is actually a victim of Microsoft, not an inherited liability. Nokia was doing a lot better before Elop (the Microsoft mole) stepped into the scene and gave Nokia to Microsoft as a gift, in exchange for a massive bonus that he was assured by Microsoft and later received from Microsoft (he has been set free again, potentially to find his next victims, Nokia not being his first).

"Actually, Nokia was starting to do pretty well with Linux (MeeGo) and was exploring Android, which now dominates the market with over 80% market share (i.e. about 2 orders of magnitude better than Windows)."The layoffs are explained a lot better by this Nokia guru, who foresaw a lot of what is happening right now. "Microsoft has now done THREE rounds of layoffs in less than 12 months," he wrote, "firing 80% of the people it bought" (and many who are not from Nokia at all, possibly as many as 10,000 if not more, excepting temporary workers).

Watch how AOL rewrites the history of Nokia. This is "revisionism on 'burning platform'," as iophk put it in an E-mail to us. Some Microsoft-affiliated sites did the same thing, using euphemisms such as "Writedown" (euphemism of convenience for shutdown with layoffs) or "Misadventures" (again, for shutdown with layoffs).

"History tells us that Nokia did not defeat the odds," wrote one person. "But inside the last five years are a number of lessons that the modern smartphone entrepreneur should think about."

Actually, Nokia was starting to do pretty well with Linux (MeeGo) and was exploring Android, which now dominates the market with over 80% market share (i.e. about 2 orders of magnitude better than Windows). To say that Nokia was a lost cause and that it had to "defeat the odds" is to totally distract from Microsoft's destruction of Nokia. Then again, Microsoft and its copywriters are always skilled at rewriting history in Microsoft's favour. In the media we might even find Microsoft portrayed as the poor victim (e.g. of Nokia's demise) rather than the predator that has had countless victims. Today's articles about Netscape's history are unbelievably watered down; some deleted Netscape from the history of Web browsers altogether. ⬆

“Microsoft is, I think, fundamentally an evil company.”

--Former Netscape Chairman James H. Clark