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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07.10.11
Posted in Deception, Marketing, Novell at 4:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Larry Ponemon’s firm, which sells bias, helps Novell seed some favourable coverage in news sites following a paid-for ‘study’ and paid-for press release
THE MOVEMENT known as “sceptics” (or skeptics for the north Americans) has grown rather popular. It is associated with developing critical skills that are derived to an extent from science, encouraging people to tell apart fake news from real news and facts from fiction (including so-called ‘conspiracy theories’). Here at Techrights we encourage everyone to take a critical look and remember the role of PR agencies. The PR industry in the United States alone is said to have a turnover of over one trillion dollars. It’s that industry which tells unsuspecting members of the public what products are “good”, what foreign policies are “good”, which companies are “good”, and which people are “good”. Bill Gates, for example, spends over one million dollars per day on PR, i.e. telling the world how wonderful he and the Gates Foundation are. It’s a really massive industry generating bias and making deliberate deception “acceptable” (because “everyone’s doing it!”). It’s why a lot of sociopaths happen to be affluent, even if they are not genuinely clever.
“It’s a really massive industry generating bias and making deliberate deception “acceptable” (because “everyone’s doing it!”).”While it is rare to see companies targeting Novell (whose future is just a trademark possibly to be abandoned), these still rarely exist and the company still has those rare press releases, from Provo even (not Boston). This new one for example is based on some claims Novell paid someone to make as means of generating promotional pseudo-articles (pasted press release) and exaggerated claims that help Novell make sales. That last one says: “The average cost of compliance associated with storing unstructured data is $2.1 million per year, according to a report prepared by the Ponemon Institute for software firm Novell.”
Another one repeats the same claims, which Novell merely bought. It’s not real research, it is tainted.
The Ponemon Institute conducted the research for networking vendor Novell, to look at the storage, control and compliance challenges that derive from the proliferation of unstructured data such as documents, presentations and spreadsheets.
Watch this Novell propaganda spreading:
The Ponemon Institute, on behalf of networking and data management firm Novell, looked at the compliance costs of managing business data at 100 firms.
How were those 100 firms selected? Did Novell put any strings on the finding? Any incentive to tilt it in one direction or another (e.g. for future contracts)? No journalist seems to be questioning those claims, just reposting them. It’s pure laziness. This is no better than PR, like like this new “Novell Customer Success Story” which is totally within Novell’s control (just like the Vibe PR blitz in YouTube, as we noted before). Novell is just trying to inject its idealogy into articles as well as inject product names like “Novell Identity Manager” into articles like this one. If this is the state of today’s journalism (no research, no days taken for independent audit of claims), then we are seriously in a miserable state of affairs. News just becomes surrogate for PR and here in Techrights we fought against shallow coverage about Novell, which mostly echoed Novell’s PR rather than investigate. If there is something people can take away from this site, it will hopefully be critical skills. It’s not just about Novell and we have decent wiki pages on this subject. These can be generalised. Had journalists done their job properly (covering, not promoting), Microsoft would not get so far with racketeering and Novell would probably avoid a treasonous deal with Microsoft.
“News of the World” is dead today, after well over a century. What a testament of our times. █
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06.21.11
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Marketing, Novell, OpenSUSE at 2:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell is circling down the drain
Summary: The degradation of the entity once known as Novell following the Microsoft-assisted buyout (euthanasia) which left the patents in Microsoft’s coffers and the OpenSUSE volunteers rather aimless, disinterested even
TECHRIGHTS spent entire years covering Novell and upon the company’s demise we continue to track its last days (pre- and post-acquisition). In recent posts we noted that managers and PR people had vanished from Novell and the OpenSUSE community lacked the level of activity it once boasted. Over the past week we have observed more of the same trends and this post is a short summary of evidence.
“In recent posts we noted that managers and PR people had vanished from Novell and the OpenSUSE community lacked the level of activity it once boasted.”Novell in Poland (Novell w Polsce) is the only source of new Novell videos [1, 2] and the only PR blogger left (there used to be a handful) is pushing proprietary software (SUSE-washed though) while a Novell-oriented site emits a couple more [1, 2].
As in prior weeks, with the exception of weekly news (from Sascha Manns in his blog and elsewhere), it is hard to see much evidence of progress on the Free/open source side of things, namely OpenSUSE. SUSE bloggers move to other places and some resort to less activity due to new jobs. To quote this one new example:
Nevertheless, Yast has fallen behind on design. The program is powerful and versatile. But there could be some improvements made in organization and space-use customization.
There is still a lot of stuff from Greece in the Planet and the blog, e.g. this post. There is some support and funding from other companies — that which is able to keep some progress going. Google Summer of Code, as we noted before, helps fund some projects that are beneficial to OpenSUSE [1, 2]. For Google it is a good investment for PR reasons and also for advancement of the Free software commonwealth that Google’s largely proprietary empire is built upon. Google is mostly a ‘cloud’ (or Fog Computing) company and the hype around this buzzword does not escape OpenSUSE, either. But just riding the Wave [pung intended] won’t save it. Attachmate is not genuinely interested in helping Free software. █
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06.19.11
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 11:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
As dependent as the money on their table
Summary: An old exposé about Gartner and new observations about IDC
THE THING about ‘analyst’ group Gartner is that it is not independent at all. In fact, as we showed time after time, Gartner is corruptible. Based on this article from 2003, this so-called ‘analyst’ which claims to be independent was tied to VCs to the extent of a 38% stake. As someone said in response to one who brought it up in USENET:
Market “analysts” are not impartial reporters, they’re paid advertisers.
“Gee, no wonder SCO’s Linux extortion lawsuit had “merit” according to these bozos,” added another poster yesterday. “Why would anyone take their word on anything?”
Gartner is also funded by a major investor called Bill Gates (indirectly), as we pointed out over 3 years ago. Well, here is an explanation from Information Week:
But it’s the individuals who invest in Silver Lake, called limited partners, who might be of most interest to Gartner clients. According to Silver Lake, they include more than 150 “leading technology executives from the top technology firms.” Some of the names you might recognize: Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates.
About a week ago we also wrote about a Gartner competitor (see our wiki on IDC), which may have been gently bribed recently in order to produce this nonesense which even the ‘Microsoft press’ is not buying. As even a Microsoft booster points out, “With WP7′s market share actually falling since Microsoft replaced the old Windows Mobile with Windows Phone, where on earth is such rapid growth — at the expense of iOS, which is currently battling Android tooth and nail for top spot — going to come from?”
In his article he points out:
But if there’s one thing industry analysts undoubtedly are, it’s conflicted (and we’re not the first to notice this by any stretch). The very companies they comment on in the press and whose performances they routinely predict are the same companies that give them boatloads of money for advice and, well, analysis and predictions, we suppose. So, there’s a conflict of interest built into every statement an industry analyst makes…
Remember that analysts are spending PR money, pretending to be unbiased when in fact their business model is that they are selling their bias to change perceptions. As an internal document from Microsoft [PDF] put it, “Analysts sell out – that’s their business model… But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with.” Bill Gates has been ‘buying’ a lot of media companies in recent years. How does that relate to the money he provides to analysts such as Gartner (who feed the media)? █
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