12.26.11
Posted in Marketing, Microsoft at 5:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Smearing competition, smearing opposition too
Summary: Aggressive AstroTurfing from Microsoft and its new department for mobile PR
JUST before Christmas, Homer posted a good summary that helps show another new example of Microsoft’s shameful behaviour.
Microsoft’s proxy PR tentacles, which even reached the FOSS world, typically not only promote Microsoft but also attack dissent. Watch out for PR piece like this one which says that “[a]ccording to [Microsoft's] organization’s publicity arm” FOSS thinks one way or another. The voice of the public or the of FOSS community gets robbed by Microsoft intruders and this is a standard routine. We gave examples of this before.
Microsoft AstroTurfing is the process where Microsoft pretends to be members of the public that post innocent comments in favour of Microsoft and against Microsoft’s competition. It is illegal, but if this sort of practice is done overseas, then regulations can be dodged. It is a legal loophole.
“Microsoft and Nokia shills caught astroturfing again,” wrote Homer, who supports his allegation with a new article that says: “Last Friday, I wrote an article about the newly launched Nokia Lumia 800. The article was aimed to educate and inform readers and buyers about this latest smartphone from Nokia so that they could make a smart decision. However, this review ruffled some feathers and we saw an orchestrated pile of comments. The common factor in all these comments was use of abusive language that explains the motive.
“However, the surprise came when I decided to check the origin of these comments. The first comments that appeared were posted by none other than the employees and associates of Nokia and Microsoft. Especially one commentator, Harish, who later realised his mistake of posting comment from his official IP address (from India) and changed it later, is the one who had written the maximum (nine so far) abusive posts. I wonder, if this is called good PR practice at Nokia and whether they believe that everything can be bought like the ad-extravaganza they created in newspapers and TV channels?”
Here is the source. Bear in mind that Microsoft used similar dirty tricks for Vista 7 promotion, as we showed around the time of its release.
Homer goes further by noting that “trolls in COLA [USENET] scoff at the suggestion they’re also hired shills, but clearly this is fairly common. In fact I’d bet most pro-Microsoft nastygrams on the Web come directly from Microsoft. Average Joe knows too little about GNU/Linux to really care, certainly not to the point of launching a vicious tirade against it. Most Android users probably don’t even know its Linux underneath, and Windows users merely endure the daily rigours of Windows, they’re disinclined to “evangelise” it.
“So who are these vicious attack dogs, that spring-up in such a timely fashion, every time someone writes anything negative about Microsoft, it’s products or “partners”, or anything positive about GNU/Linux?”
Homer quotes: “Waggener Edstrom Worldwide Rapid Response Team [...] Burson-Marsteller… Washington, DC”
“In fact I’d bet most pro-Microsoft nastygrams on the Web come directly from Microsoft.”
–HomerThe source of this? Microsoft’s official page of PR contacts. We wrote about both firms before (see wiki page on Waggener Edstrom and this example of Burson-Marsteller AstroTurf), but “Waggener Edstrom explains its “Perception Management” services,” notes Homer, who quotes: “Uncontrolled buzz can dramatically change perceptions of your brand. [...] The Narrative Network mines online dialogue and traditional media, even foreign language media, for mentions of your brand, your company, your key executives and your competitors. Then using a social networking algorithm, it associates what they say about your brand. [...] While we monitor your narrative network over time, or before and after a product launch or PR announcement, we will find new branches of a story [graphic flashes the phrase "Negative PR"]. This allows us to measure effectiveness of the PR messaging, and insert new messages or themes into your brand storyline, and deploy the right resources to keep the story on message, or adjust tactics to manage perceptions.”
That is the transcript. Disgusting. This is the type of thing Microsoft does behind the scenes. It’s like spying. When you see a blogger personally attacked for voicing opinions that upset Microsoft, watch out for comments that may in fact be arriving from Microsoft’s PR firms and their minions. Here is the source of the transcript. Right from the horse’s mouth.
“And as for Microsoft’s other shill agency,” writes Homer, “Burson-Marsteller [...] Hired A Former CNBC Reporter To Spread Lies About Google”
To quote: “The social network secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about the search giant, The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons reveals—a caper that is blowing up in their face, and escalating their war.
“For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.
“The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”
Here is the article. As Homer points out, “who is Facebook‘s closest ally?”
“Clearly we’re well beyond the point of having to debate whether or not Microsoft astroturfing is a “conspiracy theory”. It’s a palpable fact.”
–HomerAn article says: “As Google grows ever more powerful in techdom, and Microsoft’s influence slips, the Redmond software giant is building closer and closer ties to Facebook. The Facebook-Skype deal today is more evidence that Microsoft and Facebook are in lockstep as they fight their mutual foe, Google. And it comes even while Microsoft awaits regulatory approval to conclude its Skype acquisition.”
Here is the respective article.
“Clearly,” notes Homer, “we’re well beyond the point of having to debate whether or not Microsoft astroturfing is a “conspiracy theory”. It’s a palpable fact.
“But none of the above surprises me in the least, it’s just nice to see it spelled out in black and white now and then, to vindicate the stand against gangsters like Microsoft.”
Given that Microsoft employees (“TEs” as Microsoft calls them) were trying to defame me over the years (even comparing me to serial killer Unabomber), I probably have legal basis, but I would rather expose what this criminal organisation is doing, not sue. █
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12.14.11
Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A critical assessment of where SUSE stands at the end of 2011 and how this interacts with the release of OpenSUSE
THE past year has been good for GNU/Linux. On the server, for instance, it carried on gaining.
According to some figures, Red Hat keeps beating Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Linux (SUSE), and Solaris. This is not especially surprising given the recent results and upgrade of Red Hat (c/f our daily links). SUSE can see the growth of GNU/Linux, but it cannot quite steal Red Hat’s thunder, not even with Microsoft’s assistance. From the news: “Even as the Linux Foundation reports on Linux jobs in the U.S., the global picture seems to be even more encouraging.”
Over in New Zealand, SUSE is looking to “re-open Linux conversation” — whatever that actually means. They cannot even get the name right. The news site says: “Suse has informed us the official pronunciation is written soo-sah – check out this YouTube video if you’re still not sure.”
At SUSE there used to be a lot of buzz over “IP peace of mind” (Microsoft FUD) and right now there is more and more of the Fog Computing (“cloud”) hype. We gave many examples over the past couple of years. Consider this new Q&A from Australia:
There are two types of Cloud — public and private, and there is also the hybrid Cloud that’s a combination of both. We’re already in the Cloud business. You can use SUSE through a number of public Cloud providers, and we use Telstra locally. We also work with IBM and Intel, Rackspace and we’ve got some more global announcements coming up shortly about this.
Joe Brockmeier, formerly of Novell/SUSE, also pumps in that type of hype:
SUSE announced its commitment to OpenStack in October, along with a development preview available via SUSE Studio. This includes the three major components in the Diablo release (Nova, Glance, and Keystone). Brauckmann wasn’t sure about specific contributions that SUSE would be making to OpenStack, but did say that the company plans to follow up with a second technology preview in Q2 of 2012. (The “Essex” release of OpenStack will come out in late Q1 if it sticks to schedule.)
At SUSE, it is no longer important to encourage software freedom; patents and decoupling one from his/her data is now a priority. On the purely proprietary side there is also IDM which Novell spreads to keep track of people. Novell’s account in YouTube promotes the proprietary Vibe [1, 2] (based on open source but proprietary) and some other proprietary software stuff that can be found in other new files like this one. The only thing which remained somewhat open is OpenSUSE, but this is a promotional move/tool for SLE*. The so-called ‘community’ is being approached for free artwork [1, 2] while others provide documentation and reviews. OpenSUSE is not unique, but this one review says: “when I read about some of the features in OpenSuse 12.1, I couldn’t resist giving it a try.”
All those features are available elsewhere. What YaST has should have equivalents elsewhere too. There is of course also the volunteer composition of weekly reports [1, 2], putting aside the OpenSUSE project site itself [1, 2] or those who took it for a spin for comparative purposes.
The bottom line is, SUSE lost to Red Hat and it is not promoting Open Source at all. OpenSUSE is being used to add the “open” angle to SUSE marketing. Nobody really needs either of those. Smart folks simply see what else is out there and let SUSE dry up inside Microsoft’s wallet. The boycott was not in vain, and it has been very effective. █
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10.09.11
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A detailed explanation of what Microsoft is doing at the moment to indoctrinate the young and make this seem commendable
IN OUR page about counterfeiting we help show that Microsoft spreads lock-in while whining about “privacy” or calling it “charity”. This is purely propaganda. Over at the Philippines it seems like Microsoft may have bribed against GNU/Linux again, painting it with the ‘donation’ brush, as usual. The whole approach is known internally (at Microsoft) as “EDGI” and we have a wiki page about that too.
TechDirt takes apart some of the latest Microsoft PR and explains why Microsoft’s so-called ‘giveaways’ are just cheap marketing. To quote parts of it:
This means that of the $949 million dollars “contributed” to nonprofits, $844 million — 88% – was actually software, presumably Microsoft’s, since it’s unlikely it went out and bought it from competitors.
[...]
Now, I’m not suggesting that the people who put up the web page about Microsoft’s contributions to nonprofits were following that definition exactly. But equally, it seems likely that the gist is the same: it’s a kind of rough price that you’d usually find in normal markets selling the products in question. And those prices are almost certainly well above the cost of manufacturing, especially if the software was delivered online, or if multiple installations were permitted.
So the actual cost to Microsoft of that donated software is likely to be only a small fraction of the $844 million “fair market value” cited. This inevitably tempers our admiration for Microsoft’s ten-figure generosity somewhat.
But there’s something else. Microsoft wasn’t just handing out a bunch of any old products: it was giving away mostly Windows and Office, judging by a table showing a breakdown by region. Both of these are well-known for the lock-in effects they produce: once you start installing applications and creating documents with them, it’s quite hard to move to a completely different platform like Apple or GNU/Linux. Most people don’t even try.
So these free copies not only cost Microsoft considerably less than the $844 million figure it used to calculate that near-billion dollar total for its corporate brochure, but it wasn’t really altruistic at all. With hundreds of thousands of copies of Windows being distributed (417,030 were supplied for refurbished computers alone), there is a very high probability that Microsoft will be benefiting financially – and not just in terms of goodwill — from upgrades and follow-on sales for many years to come.
We no longer cover this subject as much as we used to because it has been covered to death. The challenge is explaining to the broad public (which primarily relies on television for information) that a lot of “charity” is in fact the very opposite of it. █
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09.30.11
Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is found to have manipulated the mainstream press, just like Bill Gates is doing every single day (at the expense of a million dollars, daily)
YESTERDAY we criticised elements of the press that are Microsoft PR disguised as journalism. They also help spread Linux FUD, so it’s worse than just positive publicity/promotion. It is very malicious and should be subjected to scrutiny from above, not just from below (e.g. deceived readers/viewers).
Over the years we have shown how Microsoft’s co-founder was deliberately shaping the media to match his financial interests. To him, the media is something which needs to be bought and coverage of his message is something which should be demanded, not earned. Similarly, Microsoft has been trying to infiltrate the FOSS community using PR offensives and front groups, the latest of which is known as Outercurve [1, 2], funded by Microsoft to emit press releases and promote FOSS which sells proprietary software (such as Windows, SQL Server, and so on).
““Technological Evangelism” Still Lives” at Microsoft, tells us Mr. Pogson regarding an article we found at LXer. “There is a scandal of global proportions,” he writes, and it’s about Microsoft “paying to have coverage in news programming on CNBC and BBC.”
“They are essentially just buying the stories that they want and ‘plant’ them in trusted publications.”Is anybody surprised by this? This is the same type of thing Bill Gates has been doing. He even paid the BBC tens of millions of dollars to promote his agenda (as a reminder, the BBC is intended to be funded by taxpayers to truly inform taxpayers). According to a recent report, Gates hired a “media relations” person from the BBC. To quote: “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants the media (and, it should be noted, pays some media) to emphasize “success stories” in global health and development.
“That’s fine, but sometimes the story has to be about failure. Here is a video of Jeremy Hillman, a BBC journalist who will soon join the Gates Foundation media team.”
They are essentially just buying the stories that they want and ‘plant’ them in trusted publications. This journalist knows the deal. And later he notes: “The Gates Foundation is also paying a significant number of media to cover matters of global health and development. I’ve written about this trend a few times, as have others, and have mixed feelings about it.”
All those publicists for Gates’ brand (it is a brand, one that helps push controversial corporate agenda in a “charity” gown) are doing something very dangerous because they sell agenda under the disguise of “information”. Watch what else Gates did recently: “John Sage has joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its director of stakeholder communications, with the task of heading the foundation’s civic engagement and grantee and public communications efforts, among others.”
Communications is a euphemism for “PR”. We saw this term used when IBM tried to 'game' Techrights.
As India’s richest man correctly puts it, this is just about ego:
India’s Richest Man Blasts Western-Style Philanthropy
Mukesh Ambani, the wealthiest person in India, this week criticized Western corporate philanthropy as a “disempowering tool” that does less good for the needy than his country’s traditions of voluntary service and anonymous giving, writes Agence France-Presse.
[...]
But, he added, “Whatever we give should be for our own satisfaction, it should never be for publicity. That is where we are different from the Western world.”
How true. And speaking of India, watch who’s leaving the Gates Foundation and why:
But things are getting better, he said, clearer, in terms of how the Gates Foundation sees itself helping to conceive of new strategies and assisting with the implementation as partners — rather than simply writing checks.
Gates Keepers asks, “Did he jump or was he pushed? Did his spouse have a lead on a film project? One does not just pick up two children and move them to Delhi without a financial cushion and a job or two lined up. What is the job?”
Going back to Microsoft, Mr. Pogson has suffered from some crooks who bully him in his blog. Upon closer inspection iy often turns out that some of them are so-called “Technological Evangelists", who are full-time Microsoft employees responsible for bullying Microsoft critics and essentially AstroTurfing all day long. Some of these are hired in countries where there are poor regulations so Microsoft cannot be fined.
Microsoft is habitually injecting FUD using its boosters and PR people, as we showed here (with concrete evidence) many times before. Just as Bill Gates is buying the press and injecting self-congratulatory messages, Microsoft hijacks publications and there is now fact-checked evidence to show that. Quoting the new report from the Independent:
Microsoft has been sucked into the row surrounding a London-based media company currently under investigation by broadcasters for making editorial programmes without declaring it had a commercial relationship with some of those it featured.
Both the BBC and the US-owned broadcaster CNBC are investigating FBC Media following an investigation by The Independent which showed it had made numerous factual programmes about Malaysia after being allocated millions of pounds by the country’s government to promote it.
This newspaper has evidence that Microsoft was “guaranteed” coverage on a flagship programme which FBC was commissioned to make for CNBC – which is screened in Britain – for a major launch that the global technology company was planning in Europe. CNBC recently suspended the show, World Business, pending the outcome of its investigation.
The Independent has seen a nine-page letter written to Microsoft’s senior communications managers, in which FBC promised coverage of its opening of the European Microsoft Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany, and a second project in St Petersburg, Russia.
The document referred to World Business under the heading “FBC Guaranteed Distribution Placement”. It told Microsoft: “Our flagship programme, World Business, is a weekly half-hour business news magazine, which covers the trends shaping business, particularly from a European perspective.
[...]
It offered Microsoft “guaranteed” coverage of the St Petersburg event on Tech Watch, a monthly technology programme it produced for airlines to show as part of their in-flight entertainment.
It is unclear whether UNHCR or Red Cross knew of the Microsoft/FBC PR campaign associated with this initiative. In a statement, Microsoft said it had had a commercial relationship with FBC Media from 2003 until March this year. “Where FBC guaranteed that news items would appear in their World Business programme, we understood this was based on the content meeting FBC editorial selection criteria in line with their agreements with CNBC and other broadcasters and subject to final editing before transmission,” it said.
[...]
Microsoft began its commercial relationship with media firm FBC in 2003. A nine-page strategy document written in 2004 obtained by The Independent contains excerpts which show that when the technology giant launched its European Microsoft Innovation Centre in Germany in 2004, FBC drew up a plan for Microsoft to target broadcasters with its “corporate messaging” and gave a guarantee to Microsoft that it would “place” coverage of the launch event on World Business, the weekly programme it made for the CNBC network. CNBC has suspended the show and is investigating FBC.
Corruption in the media is not unusual. It’s why some people read particular newspapers. The Guardian, for instance, pretends to speak for the people because there is a large market for ultra-liberal audience around the UK; in reality, as Wikileaks helped show, this paper is a total sham and not so long ago it even took money from Bill Gates to promote his egocentric agenda. Richard Stallman’s tip is that people should read blogs that they trust, ones that haven’t a financial agenda. It’s sad, but it is true. This is why we generally cite a lot of blogs in our daily links. The likelihood that they do mere PR is a lot lower. While their grammar might be poorer and depth of coverage in need of improvement, they at least don’t try to sell anything (ads, bias). Reading blogs as opposed to corporate press typically leads one closer to the truth, if done using a pool of different sources that balance one another. █
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09.15.11
Posted in Marketing, Microsoft at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Advertising violations
Summary: Repeated periods of downtime lead to concerns of false advertising and subsequent complaints
XBOX 360 became well known for the many class action lawsuits. It was a very defective product.
Now we see that that ASA, which we mentioned many times before [1, 2], is getting involved in the Office 365 (minus downtime) false advertising, right after another major downtime.
From The Register:
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) is checking out a complaint about claims from Microsoft that it can guarantee 99.9 per cent uptime on its cloud services.
The Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) has been prone to outages. And even its successor, Office 365, has gone down twice since its launch in late June, leading some customers to dub it “Office 364″.
On its promotional material, Redmond says of Office 365: “You can count on Microsoft, an industry leader in productivity, for reliability. Microsoft provides a financially-backed 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee.”
The ASA confirmed to The Reg it was “investigating” a complaint over “marketing communication on Microsoft’s website”.
One reader has told us that some journalists may have been bribed to blame DNS and potentially save Microsoft billions. Their articles can be used by Microsoft lawyers as a cover-up. How despicable if true. █
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08.21.11
Posted in Bill Gates, Marketing at 10:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: With financial stake in many channels of communication (even seemingly small ones like Crosscut), Bill Gates continues to push his educational ‘reform’ agenda, additionally creating yet another puppet that pushes for this agenda while hiding its roots in the Gates Foundation
THE LOBBYING to take over the education system just never stops. Indoctrination of children a taxpayers’ expense is at valuable resource for the greedy. One teacher complains about this dubious “Open Letter”, perhaps not realising that the source, Crosscut, is funded by Gates [1, 2, 3, 4]. He is taking over everything which covers particular topics, or at least seeding his propaganda in sources which he controls. To quote the teacher-turned-activist:
“4. Use the coming year as a chance to put in place some serious educational reforms, creating a powerful task force with members from the Gates Foundation, the UW College of Education, national foundations, and others to make Seattle a leading example of one or two key reforms along the lines of the Gates/Arnie Duncan idea of getting more students in front of the best teachers. Not every reform idea: just two or three that make a difference and where Seattle could (with Gates funding) lead the nation rather than dragging behind in the rear.”
Brewster wants to bring in people from the Gates Foundation and University of Washington to push reforms in SPS?! They’re already here! Goodloe-Johnson was their gal. Gates already funded her to the tune of $9 million and apparently is the sugardaddy for another of her dubious reforms, bringing TFA, Inc. to Seattle. Dean Tom Stritikus of UW’s College of Ed is a Teach for America alum who wrote an op-ed last year in support of charter schools coincidentally just before TFA got introduced to the school board agenda.
For more information about Goodloe-Johnson, see this recent post about her firing. It is rather disturbing that minions of Gates can be appointed to high positions without much trouble. Gates provides the money which they need to buy that pedestal.
Later on it turned out that more new puppets were funding the propaganda of Gates and fellow billionaires. To quote “The Fordham Institute and the National Council on Teacher Quality: Manipulating Teacher Layoffs (& Union-Busting?)”:
What the Fordham Institute Wants
The Fordham Institute, which supports research, publications, and action projects advocating “education reform,” is funded by billionaire foundations such as the Broad Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund (the Fishers own the GAP clothing stores), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation (the family that owns WalMart). It also receives support from the Fordham Foundation, a charitable foundation for charter schools in Ohio.
[...]
And who are its customers? That information is readily available on their Web site. NCTQ funders include the Fordham Institute, the Gates Foundation, and the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund. Members
of the board of directors also include charter schools groups like the KIPP Foundation and the NewSchools Venture Fund, and teacher preparation groups like Teach for America, Inc. and the New
Teacher Center – all organizations with a financial interest in altering teacher contracts in order to create openings for new, low-paid teachers with less training.
Manipulation of Contract Negotiations in Seattle: A Case Study
Seattle provides a prime example of how the NCTQ operates. In October 2009, less than a year before contract negotiations, the NCTQ produced a report called “Human Capital in Seattle Schools.” This report was commissioned by the Alliance for Education, one of many local education funds (LEFs) around the country. Like the other LEFs, it takes money from prominent billionaires and local companies. It uses that money to influence policy in the Seattle Public Schools system, and then works closely with the district to make sure that policy is implemented.
NCTQ’s “Human Capital” report cost $14,000, and was paid for in part by the Gates Foundation. (The Gates Foundation has funded the Alliance, NCTQ, and the report itself.)
And that’s not all. From around the same week we have “15 Reasons Why the Seattle School District Should Shelve the MAP® Test—ASAP”:
2. Too costly. MAP® = an unfunded mandate. The initial subscription to the test cost $370,000. But the district has spent much more since then in implementation costs. A portion of the $7.2 million Gates Foundation grant to SPS in 2009 went toward MAP®. Another $4.3 million of the February 2010 school levy was also earmarked for MAP®. Some believe that the proposed $2 million network capacity upgrade currently before the school board is also associated with the test. By some measures, MAP® has cost our school district as much as $10 million.
It has become hard keeping track of all of Gates’ front groups in education. TFA for example was a major one some months ago and last year. But they keep nym-shifting, multiplying, and using decoys, just like some of Microsoft’s front groups. “Teaching First is a puppet organisation of the Gates Foundation,” writes Gates Keepers, pointing to the article which explain what Teaching First is all about. It’s very blatant based on this opening paragraph:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spending at least $3.5 million to create a new organization whose aim is to win over the public and the media to its market-driven approach to school reform, according to the closely held grant proposal.
The organization is tentatively called “Teaching First,” and already has a chief executive officer: Yolie Flores, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, who has championed such issues as public school choice and teacher effectiveness. Flores did not immediately return phone calls for comment. A Gates foundation spokesman said she would take over the job fulltime when her board term is up in June.
The Gates proposal lays out a strategy to win public approval for the foundation’s investment of more than $335 million in teacher effectiveness programs in four school districts that involve controversial initiatives including linking teacher pay to student standardized test scores. Critics (including me) say this “value-added” model-based test scores is unfair measure of how well a teacher is doing because there are many factors that go into how well a student does on a test.
The Gates Foundation should not be mistaken for Bill’s apology to the society he hurt. Gates Foundation is yet more punishment to yet more people, even those who do not have a computer. We will explain why in the next few posts. In the mean time, internalise the reality that Gates remains around here for many years to come, probably to hurt society while imposing self-censorship on journalists. Well, read the following response to the article. It was posted here:
So, The Gates foundation strategy is an attack from the front and on the flank (Please excuse the battle metaphor). Note that Gates is approaching (aka, controlling) his corporate edu-reform propaganda from two points of entry.
He is directly funding favorable PR to organizations for his ill informed education initiative at the same time he is rating independent media reports at his obnoxious “Media Bullpen” http://mediabullpen.com/
Does anyone think that this bullpen is anything other than an intimidation tactic to marginalize public criticism of his education privatization scheme? Check out the batting averages and home runs for school choice, teacher’s unions, and funding.
Well, eventually he bribes his way into the desired outcome (desired by Gates, who sends his children to private schools, just like his pawn Arne Duncan, whose legitimacy is being lost). US education is in a state of crisis because it becomes a private business benefiting very few people and misinforming tomorrow’s children. Gates does not “think of the children”. He exploits them to gain more money and/or power. And at the end of the day when they are all suffering from this exploitation he’ll just leave them to rot in the puddle of their own misery. That’s the Mr. Gates we knew all along when he worked full-time for Microsoft. He only refers to getting children “addicted” (to Microsoft products) as a valid business model. Why should anyone accept his PR? █
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08.13.11
Posted in Bill Gates, Marketing, Patents at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Catching up with the mischiefs of Microsoft’s co-founder, who back in February had another PR blitz for self-promotion and selfish benefit disguised as “philanthropy”
WE are gradually catching up with old Gates Foundation news, handling the queue chronologically and starting where we last left off. For the uninitiated, Gates loves polio for PR reasons, even though the problem was mostly eliminated a long time ago and some of Gates’ existing investments actually cause polio, as we explained in previous years [1, 2, 3].
By controlling the corporate media just like he controls education (or strives to control it as it’s still an ongoing campaign), the facts might require proper research and sceptical analysis. We already published dozens of posts demonstrating very clearly that Gates is distorting the press with a budget of approximately a million dollars per day dedicated just to “advocacy” (i.e. media/press/PR). Our friends at Gates Keepers have found that “[t]wo newspapers of record present critical analysis of the Gates Foundation ‘megabucks against polio’ hype.” Quoting the remark preceding the examples (from the corporate press, not just some arbitrary blogs):
Two ‘newspapers of record’ have chosen to counter the flash and hype surrounding the Gates Foundation throwing money at polio eradication in order to present more balanced views. Journalists at The New York Times and Financial Times have done their homework.
It is still the minority of reports. A lot of journalists play safe by just getting along with Gates’ well-funded PR machine. Education too is becoming an area where antagonising Gates can get one dismissed. “Bill Gates (briefly) talks school reform with The [Washington] Post,” says this headline from the paper which may have expelled Melinda Gates after a scandal. The following story sounds familiar as we previously covered cases where Gates uses "health" as a Trojan horse to enter newspapers and then lobby them regarding entirely different subjects (there was a more recent example where he visited the New York Times for this purpose). Read the following:
Bill Gates dropped by The Post on Wednesday morning, mainly to plug his foundation’s campaign to eradicate polio, but we managed to squeeze in a few questions on education reform. The bottom line remains, unsurprisingly, unchanged: He’s a fan of measuring teacher effectiveness and a foe of teacher tenure.
Gates met with several writers and editors in The Post’s ninth-floor boardroom. On education, he was responding to questions from editorial writer Jo-Ann Armao, myself and editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.
(By the way, Melinda F. Gates, wife of the Microsoft founder, is no longer on The Post Co. board of directors. Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, serves on The Post board but plans to step down in spring.)
He neglects to say the reason. We covered that some months ago. It appeared like Melinda had (mis)used the paper to attack a potential rival. The Gates family does that a lot. Just watch what their lobbying operation does in order to take education away from public hands:
Joanne Barkan, writing in Dissent, argues that three big nonprofit foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation), working together, exert a “decisive influence” on public-school education.
To give another example from around the same time, we already mentioned “GOOD” being sponsored by Gates (how ironic for the name). Watch how “GOOD” is now being used to attack Gates’ competition:
Ann Marie Gardner has written an angry article in GOOD. It includes ad hominem attacks on Horton and others who don’t agree with Gardner and Bill Gates. Is this a GOOD idea? GOOD is funded by the Gates Foundation.
“The chief of malaria for the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the world health agency’s policy-making function,” wrote the New York Times in 2008. See the trend here? Someone is monopolising. And even Al Jazeera stoops low enough and kneels for Gates:
Gates has been everywhere this week talking about eradicating polio. Here he talks about this plan on Al Jazeera English. It is very clear that the money is in one big pot right now, so who is going to leap for it? With so much power (re: $$$$), Gates is in the unique position to drive global health
More polio propaganda, going back to around February of this year.
In the coming weeks we hope to catch up with a pile of news we have missed. Microsoft may be going down fast (or becoming a patent troll like Bill’s friend, Nathan Myhrvold), but Bill will stay here for a long time to come, continuing to leech and exploit society with his patent monopolies, always ensuring that he bribes the press sufficiently so that it plays along (blind praise or at least self-censorship). █
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07.21.11
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Google, Kernel, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell at 7:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Response to Microsoft’s latest public perception manipulations; a note about Mono portfolio and its proprietary nature under Xamarin’s wing
THE “killing with kindness” trick is a very effective one and it’s one that Microsoft’s PR people have used for a long time in order to paint critics of a convicted monopoly abuser (which engages in bribery, extortion, defamation, etc.) as “intolerant”, essentially characterising the victim as the offending party. We saw some of these tricks being used by pro-Microsoft lobbyists as well, e.g. in order to describe companies that Microsoft is attacking as the “bad” companies.
A new Microsoft video for the Linux Foundation — like a cake for Firefox — is part of this tactic which we have covered here for years. This comes around the same time as other PR efforts which we have been seeing this week [1, 2, 3], culminating perhaps in the suggestion that Microsoft “contributes” to Linux. Well, as the Microsoft booster from IDG points out, the real story is that Microsoft is kept aside after Microsoft violated the GPL and then needed to comply. A lot of people forget the background of Microsoft’s Hyper-V driver, which involves a well bribed Novell, a GPL violation complaint, and then massive PR/spin campaign from Microsoft. We covered this at the time and we covered it very exhaustively. As Larry reminds people:
So don’t get me started on those who would be like Neville Chamberlain trying to achieve “peace in our time” with Microsoft when the results would more than likely be, well, catastrophic as they were in Europe in the late ’30s and ’40s.
A leopard (even a Snow Leopard, but we’re getting off-topic) can’t change its spots, and to hear folks even discuss bringing up the possibility of working with Microsoft arguably is akin to collaborating with the enemy.
Microsoft’s participation in contributions to the Linux kernel, as discussed here yesterday, is based on fixing virtualization code they contributed to the kernel when it appeared that they had taken GPLed code to include in their program. So their original contribution of the code to the Linux kernel a couple of years ago was to comply with the GPL; fixing it, too, was their responsibility as outlined by the license as well. Do they deserve any special consideration for doing what they’re supposed to do?
A lot of this debate started due to bad headlines from the Linux community, later resulting in an open question for a Linux audiocast whose answers got summarised here (more in part 2). To quote one example:
spangwich said, “Microsoft’s ideology is diametrically opposed to that embodied in the Free Software movement. One is about owning, controlling and profiteering from doing so, and the other is about sharing, collaborating and (using the word carefully) ‘democratising’.”
Consider those in the ‘community’ who sidle with Microsoft, the Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza for example. As Microsoft's booster Anderson points out, de Icaza’s projects (hinged on Mono) became proprietary software-selling products, not an open source set of projects. According to de Icaza’s own blog, they now target Macs (with Microsoft API). Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has another rather deceiving headline which implies that MonoDroid and MonoTouch are open-source .NET when these are in fact proprietary products with patent risk.
It is a tad disturbing that sympathisers and collaborators of a company with criminal past (and present) are described as “peaceful”, whereas those who want justice are made to be seen as “radical”. █
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