Distorting everything

"In the Mopping Up phase, Evangelism's goal is to put the final nail into the competing technology's coffin, and bury it in the burning depths of the earth. Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency..."

--James Plamondon, Microsoft

Summary: A roundup of rigged press coverage, intended purely to serve Microsoft's agenda

MICROSOFT makes a mockery and a joke out of the media. Today we cover some of the latest examples.

The latest Microsoft marketing and pseudo-technical mumbo jumbo from Microsoft's propagandist Mary Branscombe was published by IDG the other day. It's a Microsoft ad, basically masquerading as an article not about Microsoft. Even worse was Ed Bott's (Ad[vertising] Bot[net]) Microsoft spin for Vista 10, pretending that privacy is not an issue at all. This article is so Orwellian, deceptive, and detached from reality that it's not even worth responding to. It's just more ZDNet (CBS-owned) propaganda and it's executed by a longtime Microsoft propagandist that Microsoft pays. It's not even journalism, it's just a Microsoft comedy, dismissing every concern about privacy in Vista 10 and using derogatory labels like "tinfoil hats" (much like the author did "Linux fanatics" before). The piece was translated to other languages and further disseminated by the CBS-owned ZDNet for maximum impact, masquerading as "opinion" because it's not at all objective and it is not journalism. "Microsoft boosters all around the world (even in Czech Republic nearby) link to this FUD," wrote to us Martin earlier today.

Attacks on GNU/Linux have also come from Beta News last week. The site is mostly Microsoft propaganda these days (see the managing editor's recent articles to better understand his agenda). Some of the people who work under him are even more closely connected to Microsoft and are actively showing this by attacking GNU/Linux and constantly promoting Microsoft. Microsoft MVPs are not journalists, they're Microsoft loyalists, like external staff.

A Microsoft propaganda site whose strong links to Microsoft we covered here many time before has just published a piece that is openwashing Microsoft. Originally written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN), the message is repeating Microsoft's PR, including Microsoft's moles inside the Linux Foundation. For example: "Ramji believes that under Nadella, "Open source is catching on and it's on the verge of being mainstreamed at Microsoft. The real proof will come when open source is used in product groups.""

No, Microsoft is actively attacking Free/Open Source software in order to sell its proprietary software. This is well documented. Microsoft is not only attacking Munich and distorting a story from Italy (making up 'facts', i.e. "marketing"); it attacks FOSS as a whole. Here is last week's timely rebuttal to Microsoft's claims in Italy (the City Council of Pesaro to be precise). The article from Paolo Vecchi says that "Microsoft's marketing team published a press release recently saying Office 365 is about 80% cheaper compared to the open source office suite, OpenOffice - with the figures stemming from reports in Italy and the City Council of Pesaro. The Redmond giant claims that to roll out Open Office, Pesaro incurred a one off cost of about €300,000 and had lots of problems with document formatting.

"But equally how would you convince a public sector organisation to migrate to your cloud services instead of using 'expensive' open source software?

"The obvious way would be to present a case study from a similar organisation together with a well written report commissioned to an "independent" consultancy firm. At this point your future customer has all the data and justifications required to sign on the dotted line.

"And some journalists are now presenting this case as fact of Microsoft Office 365 being 80% more economical than open source alternatives.

"I would argue that this is an isolated case and the PR efforts by big technology vendors, like many other methods, are being used to trick private and public organisations into signing contracts based on data or claims that may be not completely true."

Microsoft's PR is not factual at all. Offering massive discounts to manufacture false stories and change perception is no better than bribery. When a proprietary software giant (like Oracle or Microsoft) says "deliver savings to taxpayers" it means give shackles/lock-in with discount. The British government likes to make dumb statements like these every now and then, whenever it chooses to stay a slave of unbelievably greedy corporations with shoddy 'products' that the government has zero control over, proprietary software which is foreign too (with security flaws and national security-threatening back doors).

Microsoft's efforts to pretend to be "open" don't quite stop there because days ago we found misleading articles about "Open-Source" (with a dash, i.e. not really Open Source) Microsoft browser. Microsoft Emil (Emil Protalinski) was openwashing the browsers of Microsoft (we saw more of that several weeks ago with "Edge"), despite them being purely proprietary and standards-hostile.

Microsoft is just trying to re-brand IE and escape the bad name by means of deception, including some deceptive marketing and openwashing. "Unfortunately," says the article, "Microsoft didn’t say how long, or how many developers, it took to build this proof-of-concept browser."

A "proof-of-concept," eh? Enough to generate some misleading headlines for PR.

At the bottom there's promotional language advertising Microsoft with words like: "Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing"

This could also be rewritten (while remaining, still, factually correct) as follows: "Microsoft Corporation is a convicted monopolist financially headquartered in tax havens so as to illegally evade taxes. It licenses products it does not own (like Android), blackmails competitors, engages in various competition crimes, helps marketing companies accumulate extensive data about Windows users, and aids large-scale espionage by the NSA." ⬆