Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft's Latest 'Novel' Approach, Trying to Prevent People Moving Away From Microsoft and From Windows

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 08, 2024,
updated Dec 08, 2024

Three black birds

Related: Microsoft and the Sunk Cost Fallacy (September 2024)

Around Deny Friday Microsoft paid IDG (China) to publish SPAM as 'articles'. It's hardly even labeled properly, it shows up in feeds, and the Linux Foundation did similar things earlier this month (same mindset, even some of the same people!). Examples from this past week: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) 'Works' for Linux Foundation (LF) on SPAM Campaigns, Just Like Spamnil's TFiR (Swapnil Bhartiya) | Linux Foundation Let Linux.com Rot for Two Months and Now It Posts Ridiculous Spam | It's FOSS? No, It's SPAM.

It's all quite revealing as those ads say a lot about their business strategy. So let's examine Microsoft, based on fake articles that are just ads/SPAM.

New example:

Conquer spreadsheets to presentations own Microsoft Office 2024 for life

And also:

Just one day left to get Cyber Week savings on Microsoft Office 2024 while codes last

Seeing a pattern here? It's not even about Windows in this case, as Windows lacks "killer apps" (even gaming can nowadays be done without much hindrance in GNU/Linux).

An associate explains that "as Microsoft has lost the desktop monopoly and thus the profitability of monopoly rents, it has turned it attention more to file formats. We saw that with their vile fight and multiple incidents of corruption in the world's nations' standards bodies in 2007."

We wrote hundreds of articles about this corruption and they're still in our archive, whereas sites like Groklaw are unfortunately no longer available.

The associate further explains: "They still fear a loss of their monopoly on productivity software formats so much that they are aiming to eliminate local files completely and capture them on their servers. Not only does that ensure total lock in through a more complete blow than just controlling the file format, it also facilitates total surveillance of the contents of those files."

"I experienced this," someone said in IRC, "as OneDrive had *deleted* local files on the computer of the family friends in Leicester".

"I was supposed to reinstall the system and add a Linux install," he said, "but they were just too scared of losing data so I didn't do anything".

So this seems like a new strategy to watch out for.

"Though Microsoft is continuing its marketing campaign against open standards and even against local files in general," says the associate, "there are huge repercussions for the future of digital sovereignty there" and there are privacy aspects involved.

"Also," adds the associate, "if businesses (and agencies) outsource their internal voice communication to Microsoft Teams instead of self-hosting BigBlueButton, Jitsi-Meet, or even Mumble, then they are exposing those communications to foreign analysis on many levels. One is that communications must pass over national and thus become fair game for any and all foreign surveillance. Another is that the remote servers are accessible by foreign entities, both private and governmental. That's just two for a start."

There are several very potent governments that said they would pivot away from Microsoft. Some implement this strategy gradually if not slowly. In Syria it seems like Microsoft is floundering on its own, but mostly because Android (Google) rises.

When Microsoft loses its considerable userbase (mostly Windows users), the rest will go too. So it's important to keep abreast of Microsoft's dirty tricks in that area.

Notice how Canonical and IBM refuse to take advantage of the end of Vista 10 support. They could advertise Fedora and Ubuntu to 'orphaned' Windows users, but they don't. We know why; unlike the community, all they value is money.

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