Microsoft Destroys and Exploits, It Does Not Create
A race to nowhere
Having bet on mass plagiarism as a future direction for the whole company (sticking it almost everywhere, even when it's a clear misfit with hardly a single use case), Microsoft now sees its hopes turning to dust (and considerable debt, bad press and so on). It's just grabbing, without permission or even notification let alone compensation, other people's work, using a plagiarism blender to call it "fair use" while distorting the material and instead producing misinformation in large quantities. Microsoft is a raider.
Previously Microsoft did this to Nokia because it saw mobile growing fast (getting bigger than Windows), so it wanted to hijack the "Nokia" brand so as to sell Windows. It didn't work and Nokia nearly died. You can hardly find any Nokia handsets anymore.
Before Nokia it was Novell and having written a lot about Novell (ran a whole site about it), we can clearly articulate what happened there. Novell's purpose when Microsoft controlled it was 100% sinister. Novell decided to become a Trojan horse after its management took advice from Miguel de Icaza et al. (liaising with one's enemy, as it had done before)
Now there's this new article about Yahoo! by Steven Levy, the man who did the biography of RMS. It is shallow enough to speak about "Big Plans for AI" (they just rebrand everything as "hey hi" these days; for hype's sake!) and it's a reminder of another Microsoft victim, a high-profile victim between Novell and Nokia (chronologically speaking). Microsoft under Ballmer just sought to destroy everything. It cost Microsoft a lot of money and left the company (still) deep in debt.
"Yahoo still has not recovered from Microsoft's infiltration," an associate recalls, "which was aimed at destroying their support for FOSS in general and FreeBSD specifically."
Is any company out there foolish enough to still believe Microsoft? Look what happened to Skype (it's dead imminently) or how frequently there are layoffs in GitHub, LinkedIn, even Activision (Microsoft broke its promise to regulators). Minecraft's creator ("founder") was banished by Microsoft for speaking out his mind.
That's the typical story...
Microsoft is a touch of death. █