07.31.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Anguish of Monopolies
“We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger….If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.”
–Jim Allchin, Microsoft VP
Original from Nicholas Klein. They are fighting us while smiling (schmoozing) at us.
Summary: Government bailouts for Microsoft (passing money or national debt from taxpayers to Microsoft’s tax-evading management) won’t last forever; Microsoft as a business is becoming unsustainable or barely sustainable
THE people who have sympathy for Microsoft are either working for Microsoft or they might simply be mentally weak. Some are exceptionally gullible.
This past week we saw several US “tech” giants falling on their sword; Microsoft too isn’t doing well, it has been faking its performance for decades while taking de facto bailouts from the US taxpayers. Nowadays the levels of bailout are unprecedented and barely sustainable.
“Microsoft’s influence in the Web has never been more meager.”Seeing the rapid demise of Windows (relative to Android in particular), Microsoft resorts to illegal tactics again, this time tightening the screws on Linux and BSD [1, 2, 3, 4] while even bigger things happen at the ‘sidelines’.
Microsoft’s influence in the Web has never been more meager. In spite of plenty of acquisitions, Microsoft descended into oblivion on the server side. Its Web browser, even when almost imposed on Windows users, continues to lose market share. The same is true for Microsoft’s search engine, which Microsoft now markets by proxy in DuckDuckGo (DDG). Yes, DDG is like a Microsoft-hosted Bing proxy that allows Microsoft to spy on everybody. DDG’s management now openly admits this while refusing to spill all the beans, citing an NDA. We won’t even mention “Azure” being an utter failure because it’s not even clear what that brand is; like “clown computing”, everything gets rebranded to fake growth while Azure itself quietly lays off staff. It’s not growing. It’s technically hopeless. Military (“defence”) budget cannot eternally bail out “Azure”. Sooner or later taxpayers will realise who’s causing inflation and why. The shareholders are being conned and a lot of the money in this game is people’s pension funds. They’re going to lose it. It’s like a pyramid scheme, gambling and riding totally fictional valuations.
“The shareholders are being conned and a lot of the money in this game is people’s pension funds. They’re going to lose it. It’s like a pyramid scheme, gambling and riding totally fictional valuations.”Mentioned in passing the other day was Netcraft’s report for the end of July. The latest Netcraft report, showing sharp decreases for Microsoft yet again, isn’t mentioned by the mainstream or “tech” media. Microsoft barely registers in the charts anymore. From what we can gather, a lot of businesses appear to have moved to apache/nginx during the pandemic. Some chose third-party (not locally-hosted, e.g. with Varnish) caches and CDNs. For some that meant “clown computing” or Clownflare, which isn’t so good either (Clownflare loses money, it’s not really a viable business). Not “so good” to say the least or to put it very politely… they view the “customers” as products and site visitors as something to be sold.
On the desktop (“client”) side, Microsoft is throwing wrenches at the cogwheels at hardware level. This whole UEFI thing is obnoxious and they’ve infiltrated a lot of organisations such as OSI and the Linux Foundation, rendering them Microsoft advocacy groups, i.e. the very antithesis of their original purpose/s.
“When Microsoft goes under we’ll have a new (another) problem to deal with: staff from Microsoft that ends up in a lot of other companies, spreading unfit-for-purpose pseudo-engineering.”Microsoft is definitely fighting us. It is using the tactics of Nicolo Machiavelli, but a lot of people aren’t familiar with Machiavellian tactics, so they just aren’t seeing it. As Machiavelli himself put it: “Men rise from one ambition to another. First they seek to secure themselves from attack, and then they attack others.”
Maybe Microsoft was “underdog” in the 1980s, but back then it already sabotaged the rivals and broke the law. By the 1990s Microsoft was already on a killing expedition. Sadly, many of today’s young people don’t know this. The media distorts their perception and lies to them about the past.
When Microsoft goes under we’ll have a new (another) problem to deal with: staff from Microsoft that ends up in a lot of other companies, spreading unfit-for-purpose pseudo-engineering. That has already happened in some companies, including Nokia and Canonical. █
“…yesterday we were notified that the Microsoft representative in charge with the education strategy had requested the organizers to pull the Ubuntu presentation because it is ‘unfair competition’ to hold such a presentation at an event sponsored by them. They are indeed co-sponsors but the conference is organized by the Ministry of Education and its local office, and is being held on the premises of a public University.”
–“Then, they fight you,” May 2008
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