08.30.10
Posted in Apple, Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 5:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: For purposes of publicity and hype Microsoft is up to the usual tricks, calling its own action a “leak” and pretending it was all just an accident
SO FAR this year we have given many examples of fake ‘leaks’ from Microsoft (Apple's fake hype and other fakes are a another related thing). Microsoft does not seem to mind when the ‘leaks’ are exposed as just Microsoft marketing stunts. To the Microsoft Pinocchio, lying is a lifestyle and bogus hype is means to an end.
Last week’s news uttered something about a “Halo Reach” breach and leak [1, 2]. Poor Microsoft, eh? Well, not so fast! Microsoft is said to be enabling people to take it:
Who Leaked Halo: Reach Early? Microsoft Did
[...]
How did it happen? How does this sort of thing always happen. But in this case there’s a twist: It seems the powers that be–not some felonious bottom-rung employee–placed it in lockdown on a public file server, then handed out keys.
[...]
Should GameTuts have been fiddling around (shamefully and illegally) in Microsoft’s business? Of course not. But should Microsoft have made Halo: Reach–however bristling with security measures–available via what amounts to a public file server? Live and learn, and since keeping pirate copies off the market prior to launch day is considered commercially critical, I doubt we’ll see Microsoft make this particular mistake ever again.
Microsoft keeps faking ‘leaks’ for the known allure of taboo or exclusivity. Microsoft is also doing this with Internet Explorer right now [1, 2]. The headlines say “Microsoft Russia leaks IE9 beta” and “Microsoft leaks Internet Explorer 9 screenshot” (implying that Microsoft itself is doing the ‘leak’, which means that it is not a leak at all). It is designed like marketing material, not an arbitrary ‘leak’/screenshot and Mary Jo Microsoft is seeding it, along with other boosters of the monopoly. IDG’s Microsoft boosters (like Robert Mullins) have used that as an excuse, trying to generate buzz like a marketing company and pretending this is “news”, not Microsoft a “puff story”. █
“After sixteen months spent seeding the trade press, it was time to think of the end users. For this, Waggener Edstrom leaked exclusive Windows 95 puff stories to all of the important newspapers and publications. The PR firm fed the New York Times a story with a marketing twist, the Wall Street Journal received a more technical angle, and People magazine got an exclusive revealing that NBC’s Friends sitcom stars Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry would be doing a twenty-five-minute video, educating people on the wonders of Windows 95.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s Pam Edstrom
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Posted in Bill Gates, Marketing, Microsoft at 5:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft employees — not Free software proponents– are the sexist ones
Summary: Microsoft marketing goes awry and the company is pressured to issue an apology; a look at the Edstrom (PR) and Gates family affairs
Microsoft boosters or Free software opponents love to pretend that Free software proponents are sexist, but often it just turns out to be the very opposite. A few months ago we saw Microsoft’s “boob” incident (large advertising campaign it later "apologised" for) and earlier this year we learned about Microsoft allegedly offering female prostitutes/orgies to business partners [1, 2]. Those sex-related incidents are not a rarity, especially in advertising. Going further back we could give many more examples.
The latest Microsoft “apology” (everyone seems to put it in quotes, even Microsoft boosters) has just arrived. The Register says:
Microsoft gets Speedos in a twist over half-naked ‘Meter Maids’
[...]
The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that Microsoft had hired the women to appear at its TechEd conference on the Gold Coast.
Keep it classy, sweaty Steve. Here is more coverage of this incident (and photos):
How could they be so tactless and not foresee the backlash? It’s probably one of those cases where in a very large organisation the left hand did not communicate with the right hand. To Microsoft, this is a serious PR problem. All those years promoting the image that it’s respectful to women (we gave examples of this PR line last week) sometimes go down the drain, but Microsoft keeps choosing female faces to represent the company while giving that whole “equal opportunity” and “cultural diversity” feel-good sensation. Steve Ballmer is even married to one such PR person. She worked for Waggener Edstrom. Speaking of which, Pam and Jennifer Edstrom came up again because this PR-related blog post linked to Techrights some days ago.
It was also the video that saw Microsoft tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion. In minutes, the hard work on building Bill Gates’ reputation put in by Pam Edstrom (first as Microsoft’s director of PR and then as a senior executive at Waggener Edstrom) was eviscerated. This was when the fear stopped.
This links to an old article from the New York Times and it’s about Waggener Edstrom. It turns out that this AstroTurf/marketing firm of Microsoft was by no means pleased by the work of Jennifer Edstrom.
In the acknowledgments of her new book, ”Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft From the Inside,” the author, Jennifer Edstrom, thanks her mother for encouraging her to write, ”even though this isn’t particularly what she had in mind.”
Since 1982, Ms. Edstrom’s mother, Pam, has helped shape the public image of the Microsoft Corporation’s chairman, first as a Microsoft employee and then as an executive of the public relations firm that represents him. When she learned about preparations for her daughter’s book, a behind-the-scenes account co-written with a former Microsoft software developer, Marlin Eller, she tried, the daughter said, to dissuade her from writing it.
”My mother had commented in Fortune in January that it put her in an awkward position,” Jennifer Edstrom said from her home in Portland, Ore. ”She made it completely clear she wanted no part of it.”
Parental disapproval did not carry the day. ”It’s hard enough to control Gates,” the elder Ms. Edstrom said, ”much less your daughter.” She responded with a terse ”no comment” when asked about the book.
Waggener Edstrom currently works on Gates’ lies and image-shaping (not just Microsoft’s). It’s a lesson in why such agencies do not deserve a place in society. Waggener Edstrom bribes bloggers with laptops, for example. What we found interesting is that Pam Edstrom disregards the truth and follows the money whereas her daughter has some dignity for a change. She chose not to seek spin but to seek some truth, instead. Maybe lack of ethics is not hereditary after all. Maybe Bill Gates’ children (now enrolled in the Khan Academy) will not end up being parasites of society, unlike their father. It is too early to determine this (the children are all too young), but Bill appeared with his son at the Hanford site recently. It is a “mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington, operated by the United States federal government,” according to Wikipedia. As a reminder, Gates and fellow patent trolls have nuclear patents which he is marketing in public events and in the US government (lobbying). █
“By May of 1994, Gates’s patience was growing so thin that not even a public relations pro like Pam Edstrom could muzzle him.”
–Jennifer Edstrom
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Posted in Finance, Marketing, Novell at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“An example of one kind of IQ test item, modeled after items in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test.” [via Wikipedia]
Summary: Novell’s attempt to associate itself with wisdom is proving to be a dumb strategy which alleviates none of the worries customers have
A FEW DAYS ago we argued that Novell tried branding — not new products — to rescue itself. Euphemisms, a new motto, and labels like “intelligent” and “IQ” are being used sparingly (and even echoed by this nice and informative show, LNLP). Timothy, one of the few insightful writers who are left at The Register, makes the same observations in relation to Novell’s poor results from last night.
While it’s convenient to say that the softness in Novell’s business is due to a rejected and unsolicited takeover bid from New York hedge fund Elliott Associates back in March, there very well could be something else going on here — such as customers preferring the integrated stacks of software from Microsoft or Red Hat, just to name one possibility.
And merely slapping the WorkloadIQ name on the operating systems, appliance spinners, security, provisioning, and access control programs that Novell has sold separately — as it announced it was doing last week in order to have something positive to say during the Q3 call with Wall Street — cannot change that. Novell needs to be a safe place to invest in the long term to win that kind of deal.
But throwing all possible futures in the air — including selling the company, breaking it up, distributing some of its $1bn cash hoard to investors, or keeping on doing what it has been doing — and not picking one for five months does not make Novell seem safe. That’s probably why Novell is wilting a bit in a Linux market that is growing nicely.
Jan Wildeboer pokes fun at Novell by writing that ‘Novell said its quarterly revenue dip “is principally related to customer uncertainty”‘ and ‘”while customers are intrigued by Novell’s technology, too many of them don’t feel confident finalizing a purchase”‘ (whose purchase? Novell's?). █
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Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 6:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Smearing a person does not constitute a
valid rebuttal (unless conflict of interests is shown)
Summary: Techrights is being smeared for stating what Microsoft is unable to refute, except by personal attacks, speculations, and spin
MICROSOFT’S SILVERLIGHT HAS LOST a lot of very major customers. We named some of them. We also referenced several articles from the mainstream press — articles which said that Silverlight had failed to gain traction. It is just a load of hype. Even the hype is muted by now.
“Truth hurts sometimes, but it doesn’t mean it should therefore be suppressed or censored.”The thing about calling these facts out, people often resort trolling me personally, especially in Twitter and less occasionally via E-mail or IRC (using the messenger’s name as a punch bag). One can get used to it. Truth hurts sometimes, but it doesn’t mean it should therefore be suppressed or censored. That was the case when a Zune fan site (yes, a whole site dedicated just to Zune) featured a post from Techrights this week and then approached a spokesperson from Microsoft trying to calm down the poor fans, whose dedication to Zune is likely to end soon because Zune is a dying brand and project. We explained why that’s the case and also highlighted the close relationship with KIN, whose death renders Zune software rather obsolete. If Zune fans are going to attack those who simply point out the obvious, it is them who lose credibility, not Techrights, which merely quoted a former Wal-Mart manager about Wal-Mart’s stock of Zunes.
We are getting a similar type of backlash at the moment because of Silverlight, not just Moonlight, which had the Mono boosters and Novell employees intimidate and smear us. For just over a year we’ve been tracking news headlines about “Silverlight” in order to spot trends. We have seen it mentioned less and less over time, until it was not mentioned at all or mentioned about once a week (sometimes because it’s dumped by early adopters, which generates headlines). Last night a recent post of ours was featured in TechDirt and the comments there are quite predictable (see how the Microsoft apologists joined the discussion just hours later, posting “damage control”/PR after all the regular readers of the site). To quote just one response to the Microsoft apologists:
You are assuming that Windows Phone 7 OS will be a huge success. I rather doubt it at so many levels. Even the name of the OS is wrong. Is Windows Phone 7 OS – Windows 7 running on a phone if so why or if not why not? It is very confusing. It is too little too late. Even Blackberry’s latest OS is losing traction.
The innovations are moving WAY too fast for Microsoft to continue to play catch up. The problems lies a the CEO level.
I remember when Ballmer used to ridicule running applications on a browser and now he is playing catch up. I remember when Ballmer ridiculed running a browser on a phone. Now he is playing catch up. etc, etc.
As this comment implies, the ‘Silverlight brigade’ is using Vista Phone 7 [sic] to say that Silverlight is needed, but that is just nonsense. Judging by the failure of KIN, the only sales of Vista Phone 7 one ought to expect is the giving of such phones to all employees of Microsoft (whether they want it or not) and the huge spendings of $250,000,000 just pushing this “too little, too late” piece of junk into the market. Based on the silence surrounding Silverlight (and Moonlight too), there is not much development going on and even vapourware hardly ever appears anymore. By many indications, Silverlight will remain as widespread as Zune. It’s a niche product which even Microsoft partners like MSNBC refuse to use. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Finance, Marketing at 3:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“In the fall of 1982, Pam Edstrom [of Waggener Edstrom], a diminutive woman with piercing blue eyes, was recruited by Microsoft. [...] In modern-day business, flacks were responsible not only for avoiding bad press, but for spinning the good. [...] Hanson and Edstrom would spin a whole new image for Gates himself. They would tap the best and worst of Chairman Bill, changing his clothes, his voice, and his allegiances, driving him to become not just the boss, but, essentially, the company mascot—a sort of high-technology Colonel Sanders.” –Pam Edstrom’s daughter
J. P. Morgan assaulting photographers – an
example of bad PR from robber barons
Summary: An outline and an analysis of Gates Foundation news from the past two weeks
The Gates Foundation commands many publications, which makes it difficult for one to gain access to PR-free coverage that was not seeded in a source where problematic aspects got concealed. Control over information is assured by a large team of PR people and publicists who are employed by the Gates Foundation to advance its cause. We covered this before and showed that Waggener Edstrom also works for the foundation now. They even have something called an “advocacy officer” at the Gates Foundation.
Watch how the Atlantic Wire — not just papers like the Washington Post — are controlled by Gates Foundation types.
The editor of the Atlantic Wire is the husband of the former CEO of the Gates Foundation.
This husband also ‘planted’ a story in Time, glorying Gates. Disclosure of this is hard to come by. Here is the coverage in question. It deals with unjust tax exemptions for the richest people, using loopholes that they themselves create. Gates happens to be one of these people who needn’t pay tax because he puts all his money in an account labeled “charity” (the major activity it actually does is investment in firms such as Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart, as we last explained on Monday). From the article:
Donations? How About Actually Paying Taxes Peter Wilby takes the opposite approach in the Guardian, with a more comprehensive critique of so-called philanthrocapitalism. “The US treasury already loses at least $40bn … a year from tax breaks for donations,” he writes. Not only does the government lose the money, but the billionaires then get to determine what the “good causes” are. Other problems with philanthrocapitalism include that it tends to “[tackle] symptoms of poverty and distress rather than underlying causes,” and tends to towards “do[ing] things to the poor, rather than with them.”
We’ll come back to the taxing question in just a moment.
Pay attention for those who are daemonising or at least dismissing critics of the world’s richest people. There are common ways of doing so.
On one hand, there is a reason for some modest concern – there are plenty of stories of wealthy individuals using “charitable” foundations and organizations as a means of sidestepping taxes and paying fat salaries to friends and family members. Generally speaking, though, there has been a pretty substantial improvement in external oversight of these organizations, not the least of which by the IRS. Consequently, this concern is largely moot – or a true cynic can simply resolve that a sufficiently motivated and wealthy individual will find a way to contravene any system. (You may not have billions, but giving can still ease your tax bill. Check out Deducting Your Donations.)
Another new article about this subject is titled “The opposite of greed” (similar new article which also covers Gates is titled “Philanthrocapitalism: Can the rich save the world?”) and here we have mischaracterisation of the campaign from Bill Gates Sr. This article is not correct, for reasons explained before [1, 2, 3].
The most prominent is in Washington state, where Seattle lawyer Bill Gates Sr., father of billionaire Microsoft ( MSFT – news – people ) founder Bill Gates, has gotten into the act. He’s pushing for passage of a voter initiative on the November ballot that would impose a new state income tax on the affluent only, starting in 2012.
The truth is, nothing is done to actually tax the Gates family here. They continue to put their money in a tax haven, so this policy only harms those beneath them, still.
The most common way of downplaying concerns in these situations is to question the rationality of critical messengers and instead of voicing their criticism just focus on useless PR moves (like Buffett raising $4,500). The critics do have a legitimate message; Authors are characteristically trying to paint this as “jealousy” (also in here) without critically investigating the facts and challenging consensus. For instance, critics of the Gates Foundation and its ulterior motives are often described as “cynics” and their positions misrepresented [1, 2]. “Giving it all away for good” is a new article which puts it quite nicely:
When I first read about the Giving Pledge, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s campaign to get billionaires to pledge away half their fortune, or more, to charity, my first reaction was one of distaste.
It seemed such an ostentatious thing to do. Not content with being billionaires, they now seek the brownie points of overt philanthropy. They seek out admiration, approval, esteem, not for being rich but for being generous. I even thought there was a whiff of arrogance and condescension about it: how many of us would give away half of our fortunes? How many of us could?
It is often being said that those who give away money they hardly have do deserve more credit than those who took a lot away from society and then work on portraying themselves as the world’s most generous people. But that’s not the real point. The real point, as we routinely show, is that giveaways are typically given which only increase the giver’s power (if not wealth). There is a return on investment in these donations and that is exactly what one needs to investigate more closely. Here is another sceptic who looks for insight in last week’s news:
A bunch of billionaires have signed up for Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’ “Giving Pledge,” promising to give away half or more of their money to charity. Sounds great, right? Not to Ron Rosenbaum of Slate. “I think I can speak for the rest of the world when I say: Dudes, the ‘pledge’ is nice and all, but show us the money if you want the credit,” he writes, declaring the promise a “nebulous never-never-land pledge.”
Here is one last take from Murdoch’s press:
When 40 of America’s richest individuals signed the “giving pledge,” a challenge set by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to donate half of one’s wealth to charity, at least one philanthropist was not impressed. “My opinion is: So what?” says Lewis B. Cullman.
With a record of giving that extends in the hundreds of millions and throughout New York’s cultural institutions, Mr. Cullman, who is 91, is alarmed by how the money donated to charity by the very wealthy usually ends up. Locked, he tells me, in private grant-making foundations that may only release a trickle of the billions of dollars squirreled away inside.
Also in the news:
In the meantime, does anyone know if Bill Gates gave to one-world type causes before Microsoft got hit with the antitrust suit? I.e., is it possible that Bill Gates doesn’t actually support the stuff the Bill Gates Foundation funds, but the deal was he could keep his company if he played ball like the other billionaires?
The Guardian has sceptics writing in, e.g.:
Andy Beckett asks the question “should we be worried?” The answer must be an unequivocal yes. No one person should be allowed to accumulate this much wealth. This, more than the ills Bill Gates attempts to alleviate with his largesse, is the true crime against humanity.
There are conformists too:
The pledge of the US billionaires is perhaps a signal of a directional change that we are beginning to see in the prevailing dominant thinking. It is symbolic of their wanting to ‘give up greed to support need’ (not charity) and should not be treated as yet another CSR event. This perhaps is the beginning of a process of real change in the existing world order that can lead to ensuring its sustainability.
In reference to this article, Gates Keepers has this to say:
Normal people cannot see your yacht and jet and cannot get close to your mansion. But they sure can see your philanthropy, especially when you hire publicists to be sure they do.
We go back to the original point about publicity. Nobody does it better than the Gates Foundation. Gates has been hiring lots of PR people (some from peripheral, outside agencies whose job is to shape his image). Then there are investments in many media outlets, such as NPR.
In the previous post about the Gates Foundation we were also going to show how Gates still controls the education system using the press which he controls (including education-focused press). To put it in the words of a critic of Gates’ role in capturing the education system:
The model most favored by the “venture philanthropist” billionaire reformers like Eli Broad, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg along with Arne Duncan is typically the KIPP-style franchise, which arguably is fairly punitive.
[...]
Et tu NPR?
Even the supposedly liberal National Public Radio has run stories recently that are obsessively focused on the faults of teachers at the strange omission of all other factors. Curiouser and curiouser. Is it a coincidence that NPR receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Teach for America – two enterprises that support charters and “education reform”?
[...]
What it will likely do is continue shrinking school curriculums into the box built by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, weaken the teaching profession and teacher unions, make test scores even more high stakes and certainly more high profit, and solidify the education industry as the dominant voice for urban school matters in America. That’s pretty good bang for your buck, or some excellent leveraging, as Bill [Gates] and Eli [Broad] might chuckle.
We previously wrote about how Gates is sponsoring NPR and how it seemingly affects coverage. It’s a good investment for Gates, who is controlling the media to an extent, using money. NPR is again advertising Gates and offers no disclosure about their financial relationship. The same goes for Education Week which is running Gates propaganda pieces, at least with disclosure this time around.
(Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week, also receives grant money from the Gates Foundation.)
We were going to deal with the (mis)education issue in the previous post, but it is clear that an overview will be needed some time in the near future, maybe even a comprehensive Wiki page. In the mean time, watch how Ina Fried continues the Gates PR while pretending to be a journalist [1, 2]. That’s distasteful coverage from CNET, which typically prides itself in coverage about technology, not evangelism for dangerous egomaniacs.
“The gist of it is that people in the mainstream press measure generosity not by proportions in giving (like someone giving 95% of his/her wealth) but by absolute values.”NewsWeek, whose managing editor has just moved to Microsoft, is also pretending to nobody but Gates is generous. We’ll address this pattern of coverage in just a moment. The gist of it is that people in the mainstream press measure generosity not by proportions in giving (like someone giving 95% of his/her wealth) but by absolute values. Oo scrutiny is given based on receiving ends, either (some people donate… to terrorist groups).
First we’ll just show part of the hypnosis and self advertising in public events and even the Huffington Post, which gave Gates a blog in which to advertise. It recently created a whole corner for such promotion, possibly with financial help from Gates (this is just a suspicion given the timing and the relationship between the Gates family and the Huffingtons). We previously showed that ties between the powerful (as in rich or politically able) are being exploited to serve those families’ interests or vision of the world while not paying attention to those who are affected.
Clinton’s relation to Gates’ agenda [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which is mentioned in this new article about “philanthropic propaganda”, must not be ignored (Gates is also tied to Tony Blair). There is strong criticism of the “globilisation” involved:
Bill Clinton is perpetrating this global blackmail through his William J. Clinton Foundation, headquartered in Little Rock, Ark. Amazingly, the foundation is fueled by a $140 million annual budget. More amazing is who is giving him that money in support of his globalist plans.
The biggest contributor to Clinton’s globalist war chest was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which tossed in a hefty $25 million- plus. Gates also made sure that his company, Microsoft, tossed in another $250,000 – $500,000. Google was counted in for that same category, and so was Cisco.
Former Gates staff serves a similar role in the Obama government, which should not be entirely surprising [1, 2].
Earlier this year, he left a job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle to work for the Obama administration.
Africa has its share of sceptics about the rich and powerful people from the West, who claim to help while actually investing in the companies that cause the most harm to Africa [1, 2]. From Kenya we have:
Method to the Madness points out some of the dangers of private foundations such as the Bill Gates Foundation, running ‘aid’ programmes in Africa. Unlike NGOs, the Bill Gates Foundation is not subject to any controls other than those it makes itself. Additionally the foundation often invests in industries and sectors that are detrimental to the poor as well as upsetting the ‘aid train’ if for example too much emphasis was placed on African countries as investment opportunities:
‘I don’t think the Gates Foundation is completely unencumbered. It could potentially deal a blow to aid agencies, the calculus goes, for the word to get out that African countries also present economic opportunities. With the PR machine having done such a good job of telling people how messed up things are, it would now be hard to be seen as making money from a land where everyone is poor. It’ll be hard to spin that, because it’ll involve a counter-narrative, one that could potentially be harmful to all the efforts to generate aid for projects all over the continent. Too many images of happy, smiling, not-emaciated children eating cheeseburgers and playing basketball after schools not in clay huts, and next thing you know the Western audience breathes a sigh of relief and thinks, “Oh, good! They’re not basket cases anymore! Now we don’t have to care since they can take care of themselves!” Folks would stop buying baskets from Africa with proceeds to go to the One Campaign’s efforts in some random village. And the US will then feel more comfortable relaxing its 0.7% of GDP aid commitment to African countries (which they already don’t meet anyway), and reducing for PEPFAR (Which, even as good as the PR machine is, they’re currently doing).’
Notice the part which says: “With the PR machine having done such a good job of telling people how messed up things are…”
This is a typical tactic from Gates, who says colleges in the US are messed up and therefore he needs foreign workers (on visas). He also says the schooling system is broken and therefore he should step in and change all schools based on his personal vision, wherein he becomes de facto education czar.
When people describe Mr. Gates as “generous”, be sceptical. Gates is a very greedy man (for money and power, which are interchangeable). █
“Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don’t evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, ‘how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?’”
–Bill Gates, The Seattle Weekly, (April 30, 1998)
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08.26.10
Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Novell, OpenSUSE at 6:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Power of One Microsoft Way?
Summary: A new initiative from Novell helps explain Novell’s tyrannical nature when it comes to software, which it would rather use to dominate customers and suppliers, as opposed to share and decentralise
“The Power of One” is about to become a new slogan/motto/tagline at Novell, based on its marketing chief. The intention of this statement can easily be taken out of context:
In particular we recently launched a company wide initiative called “The Power of One”.
[...]
The Power of One is an important reminder to all that in most things “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned”.
Novell has been struggling to give power to others. Just like Microsoft, Novell is a control freak. Consider for instance yesterday’s announcements about Fog Computing. Novell is all proprietary, unlike Red Hat. Novell’s marketing people do nothing to emphasise “open source” in Fog Computing, either. Even when Novell tries to give an illusion of “community” it is mostly just Novell staff in a “community” gown (even the new community manager of OpenSUSE). Consider this new post from Novell’s Andreas Jaeger. They have had trouble when board members evacuated OpenSUSE abruptly, so:
I see the following situations not handled:
* Less candidates than seats for a category (Novell/non-Novell)
* Equal number of candidates and open seats for a category (Novell/non-Novell)
* a board member resigning
* a board member disappearing and not engaging in the board
* a board member getting hired by Novell or leaves Novell
In order for Novell to not just give the impression of independence in OpenSUSE, something must be done. As it stands, OpenSUSE is all Novell (the management, the trademark, the direction, almost everything!) and this is going to cause trouble now that Novell sells itself. Based on OpenSUSE, someone has just created Me-OS. Maybe it’s time to fork OpenSUSE [1, 2, 3]. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Marketing at 2:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest batch of critical news about what Gates is doing (using his foundation) to change the structure and operation of schools in the United States (and increasingly beyond that)
TECHRIGHTS has published a few dozens of posts about ways in which the Gates Foundation became the underground department of education (it gradually becomes an international issue as even Vietnam and Greece get affected). It really is an attack on the independence of school systems because the personal agenda of one family is being served rather than the agenda of many parents who send their children to school. “YES The Gates foundation IS trying to tear down public education and replace it with CHARTERS,” says one headline from Democratic Underground this month. SeattlEducation2010, a site which we first mentioned last week, has a response to “an open letter to Seattle public school parents” by its schools’ coalition. It says:
The Alliance for Education is backed by Bill Gates and the Broad Foundation. Both organizations are big backers of charter schools and high stakes testing among other things
[...]
That seems innocuous enough. Who doesn’t want the best quality education for their children? Unfortunately, after several groups signed on to this statement, it was then used by the Alliance for the purpose of pushing the Race to the Top agenda fueled by Gates and Broad money.
“The Problem With Billionaire Philanthropists” is another new article which names Gates as a big problem because of education (note that Education Week is funded by Gates, but the following author does not seem to know it and we’ll cover this later):
In 2006, for example, Education Week named Bill Gates the single most influential person in education of the past decade – more so than President George W. Bush, who had passed the No Child Left Behind law. (Gates had just spent over $2 billion to promote the creation of small high schools, with much of this money wasted by his own account). Eli Broad, another billionaire — and strong charter school fan — has also spent a vast fortune to influence public education, long thought of as one of America’s most democratic arenas.
SeattlEducation2010 goes on and writes about “The Gates’ Foundation and the Department of Education.” It’s a guest article.
I conclude with a discussion about the final category, the Gates Foundation, particularly the waiver for James H. Shelton III, Assistant Secretary for Education and Improvement, and, to a lesser extent, Margot Rogers, the Secretary’s Chief of Staff (Note: Rogers has since left her post and Joanne Weiss, former COO of NSVF and head of the Race to the Top, is now Duncan’s Chief of Staff). I have focused on these two appointees because they hold important positions; their waivers allow for the most extensive contact with their former employer; and their background in philanthropy raises some interesting questions.
While I am not aware of any other analysis of waivers for Executive Agency appointees, various media outlets have picked up on the Gates Foundation’s significant involvement in federal education policy: Michelle McNeil of EdWeek noted multiple Gates employees filling the Department of Education; Sam Dillon of the New York Times reported on the foundation’s role in helping some states write their Race to the Top application, including complaints the foundation was trying to hand-pick eventual winners; Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect wrote about the i3 fund and how much of the federal agenda is “borrowed” from the philanthropic community; Libby Quaid and Donna Blankinship of the Associated Press began one article with, “The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates,” and noted the foundation’s growing influence on education policy; Erik W. Robelen and Michele McNeil noted in EdWeek that some observers suggest the Education Department and philanthropic organizations are “collaborating to an extend that may well be unprecedented”; Clay Holtzman of The Puget Sound Business Journal noted the similarities between the foundation’s agenda and the federal Department of Education’s agenda; and a recent Washington Post headline read, “Gates Foundation playing pivotal role in changes for education system”.
From the same author we found some other posts which go as far as warnings about "neo-eugenics". “A New Civil Rights Movement or A Neo-Eugenic Mass Treatment of Children,” says one of the headlines. It’s a grey area, just like abortion at the Gates Foundation, not just birth control. Either way, sticking to education, the thing about Gates’ staff is that they are trying to control, not to help. If they also help while they control, then that’s just an added value (bonus), but it rarely actually happens. Here is another school which is shaped by Gates:
The new STEM school, financed in part by the Gates’ Foundation, looks to Nova High School as an example of project-based classes.
They are hiring marketing firms to do their legwork:
What I want to focus on briefly is how the Alliance shamelessly used our students to promote their, rather the Gates and Broad, agenda last night. Under the umbrella of the Alliance for Education and paid for by Broad and Gates money is their offspring “Our Schools’ Coalition” developed and produced by Strategies 360, a national marketing firm paid for by Stand for Children. Stand for Children, also backed by Gates’ money, apparently has joined forces with the Alliance or at least they did last night.
Another issue we covered here before is the throwing of millions at more self-serving ‘studies’ (ones that support Gates’ position). Here is a new complaint about it:
This is the business perspective that has been the model for the Broad Foundation and Gates in terms of how they think schools should be run and children taught.
This report was sponsored by the Alliance for Education and has received funds, $9M from Bill Gates and $1M from the Broad Foundation. Some of that money was used to pay for this report as is described on page 2.
This report is a precursor to merit pay, high stakes testing and ultimately charter schools. This has been the method that the Broad Foundation and Bill Gates have used in other school districts around the country to introduce their ideas of “venture philanthropy” in our educational system.
I’ll hit some of the highlights.
“About this study:
This study was undertaken on behalf of the 43,000 school
children who attend the Seattle Public Schools.”
Or on behalf of Bill Gates? I didn’t know that the students and parents of the Seattle School District or any school board members asked for this study.
This is really scaring some teachers. Suddenly they need to look up to some private foundation rather than their government.
A good example of education going more private in Gates’ hands is Hillsborough. For background see:
Gates is advertised in just about any article about those Hillsborough schools [1, 2, 3]. Hillsborough is the model example Gates is trying to present before expanding the same policies he’s pushing for to other school districts. Here is more PR (and putting of the teachers under examination). Over in Memphis, which is another Gates experiment in schools, there is this new article:
Is $1,500 a day enough for a new Memphis City Schools consultant (Aug. 18 article, “New venue / Consultant’s ideas for turning around failing schools earned failing grade from parents at last stop”)?
[...]
Oh, well, Supt. Kriner Cash probably needs help figuring out how to spend the gazillion dollars MCS is getting from the Gates Foundation.
We wrote about this scheme in Memphis under:
There are other schools which are controlled by Gates:
Vince served as teacher leader of The Discovery School, one of five Gates Foundation “small schools” within Mountlake Terrace High School, where he has taught for 22 years. Vince was twice named the state journalism adviser of the year and Edmonds School District Educator of the Year.
Why is the Gates Foundation treating school boards and teachers like pupils? It is demeaning.
But unlike in baseball, which has a wealth of commonly accepted statistics that are better than batting average, teaching doesn’t, at least not until such efforts as the Gates Foundation’s yield results.
As another example of spin:
But to prevent those outcomes, more of us must step up to intervene. Help from foundations such as the Belk Foundation is especially needed. The work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shows how transformative such help can be when it is targeted on education issues. The Gates Foundation has been instrumental in promoting strategies and school innovations that have become national models for improving educational outcomes for struggling students from economically disadvantaged homes.
No, that is just the story they are telling because they are forcing change, appointing their own people to run things, and/or funding people to move their agenda. There is also full-time paid staff allocated/assigned to it. As a new example from the news:
Mark Milliron, Deputy Director of Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stresses that the United States is simply not producing enough trained workers.
One has to be abundantly careful here because of the self-fulfilling prophecy which gets spread when they refuse to hire locals and thus discourage them. It looks like the same tactics that Gates and Abramoff used to get more visas to enrich themselves, by cursing the intelligence of people in the US educational system. Vilifying the existing system (as Gates is doing) in order to change it is the crudest tactic. Money talks and rich people get to tell the government what’s right for education. Some days ago in CNET we found this reminder:
For instance: In 2005, midway through the Bush administration, Microsoft’s Bill Gates told a Washington audience that curbs on immigration and guest workers would provide a boost to research institutions in China and India. A year earlier, then-Intel CEO Craig Barrett warned that the U.S. must dramatically improve its education system.
That’s just an excuse and a pretext for taking over that system, not just import cheaper labour that receives no benefits. Gates has his share of education lobbyists, too:
Additionally, several Gates and Broad Foundation-funded lobby groups have been disseminating inaccurate information relating to the current contract negotiations and the issues involved.
More here:
In truth, the Alliance has an “education reform” agenda that is largely funded by Los Angeles AIG billionaire Eli Broad’s foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates’ foundation. LEV is also primarily funded by the Gates
[...]
As for the poll that the “Coalition”/Alliance/LEV/Gates/Broad paid for that allegedly claims parents and community want “merit pay,” by all accounts it started off as a highly questionable and biased “teacher quality” survey, which was withdrawn when genuine school community members protested, and reemerged as a very slanted push-poll taken of a curious cross section of community members (including some teachers via their private cell phone numbers).
This is the first time that we see proper lobbyists being employed to push such an agenda. The rest is mostly additional evidence for what we already knew. █
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