Bonum Certa Men Certa

As Yahoo Proxy War Looms, VMWare and Nokia Return to One's Mind

"Number two is move Netscape out of the win32 client area."

--Paul Maritz, Vice President, Microsoft



In a recent analysis, "Did Microsoft Hijack XenSource Like It Tries to Hijack Yahoo?", we explained the role of insiders in subverting a company's direction. Only yesterday, as already mentioned in our digest, news emerged that Yahoo got sued for declining Microsoft's offer. Another by-proxy lawsuit? Your call. Microsoft explicitly said that it was entering "proxy war" mode only days beforehand.

VMWare Gets Insider



Takeovers, takeovers, takeovers.

What's with all the takeovers anyway? Might this be the effect of a recession Soros speaks of nowadays? These are some interesting yet very confusing times that we live in. An acquisition by VMWare has just brought this somewhat alarming news.

Former Softie Maritz to head cloud computing at EMC



Former Microsoft Platforms chief Paul Maritz may be best remembered for his alleged threat to “cut off Netscape’s air supply.” (For the record, Maritz has denied he ever said those exact words.)


Paul Maritz brings many memorable quotes back to mind. Why will he be heading a company that Microsoft intends to attack from multiple directions? That's how they typically begin to affect companies like XenSource and even Google. One of our readers, who is also an active participant in OpenSUSE, called these "Microsoft inside jobs" (or insiders) and he once suggested that Novell might be a victim also.

"The major reason for this is: to combat [Netscape] we have to position the browser as “going away” and do deeper integration on Windows. The stronger way to communicate this is to have a “new release” of Windows and make a big deal out of it. We will thus position Memphis as “Windows 98. IE integration will be the most compelling feature of Memphis.

--Paul Maritz, Vice President, Microsoft



On Nokia, Microsoft and Other Arbitrary Thoughts



With the sudden departure of the long-time chief of Microsoft's Mobile Unit, it hardly seems like Microsoft's future in the cellular area is all that bright. The chief moves on to Vodafone by the way.

The Nokia-Trolltech situation [1, 2, 3, 4] gives not so many reasons to cheer. In fact, rather curious was the recent Nokia-Microsoft flirt. which fortunately ended up with no major announcement being made. But let's look a little closer at possible relationships between those two companies.

After posting this short article, a reader got in touch and below are parts of the conversation which you may or may not find interesting (the first part in particular).




Reader:

Think of adding one main link to a good article on a non-Microsoft tool in each article.

Microsoft would rather have criticism than talk about their competition. Talking about the real tools frustrates that.

BN:

Linking to Nokia, a software patent lobbyist?

Reader:

Yeah it sucks that Nokia bought Trolltech. Nokia does some good things, but their software patent lobbying and their sabotaging of Ogg in HTML5 really compensate. By the way, if you look at the HTML5 fiasco, Stephen Wenger's full resume explains a lot: he worked at Microsoft for several years. It's so much like Scientology, except dressed as a business rather than a Church.

[,,,]

Call me cynical, but when the news first hit Slashdot the first thing I did was see who the company rep was and then search for his homepage and read his CV. Voila. Mystery solved.

The recent Groklaw story goes a little into these methods:      http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071023002351958

but nothing explicit about use of fifth columnists. Microsoft apologists always counter with accusations about "conspiracy theorists"(*) Were it that simple to dismiss. Just because it's harmful does not mean it's a conspiracy.

“Ad hominem is one of their most commonly used and successful counters to just about everything. e.g. Look at Massachusetts.”All that brings me back to the question of what place in tomorrow's society can there be for today's Microsofters? They have jobs but what they do in their jobs doesn't actually benefit their own employer, but instead puts Microsoft interests ahead at the cost of their employer. That's both up front cost and lost productivity. And further it's done over time in spite of many opportunities to take a different path. So the choice to cause harm is made not once but many times. Given that level of breach of trust, where can they fit in?

And that also skips the unpleasant question of their lack of technical skills.

(*) Ad hominem is one of their most commonly used and successful counters to just about everything. e.g. Look at Massachusetts. I notice that Quinn's name has not been cleared despite all the time passed since the accusations and smear campaign.

[...]

Both points (conspiracy + ad hominem) in the first half: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/169233/open-xml-vote-has-turned-into-a-riot.html

Checkout the date-time stamps of the article (UTC) and my message. (UTC +2) :) It's like clockwork or script.

[...]

BN:

Mind you, Microsoft hires abroad, so ex-Softies are independent from total headcount at Microsoft.

Reader:

As are permatemps. It was my hypothesis that this was done so as to be able to downsize without reporting mass layoffs.

I've unfortunately been off Usenet for about 1.5 years. It's of major importance, or at least of major use, with the OLPC project because of the mesh network - async communications. It needs to get relaunched, perhaps with a redesign to deal with spam, in the US, China and Russia to counter facism.

However, Microsoft is growing into a large anti-democracy movement of its own. If enough people sell out / turn quisling, then it can trump the current world powers.




An equally interesting E-mail exchange brought up some interesting observations about staff reduction. This message was receive just a couple of hours ago from a well-regarded veteran whose name won't be mentioned here:




Anonymised, in reference to Microsoft's growing pains:

Interesting. They have a lot of mouths to feed so if they do run into income problems it won't take long to show up. There is a limit to how long accountancy can hide stuff.

BN:

Novell is the same. They admitted it (to Asay, in private).

Anonymised:

I'm not at all surprised about Novell. We used Netware back in the late 80s and I thought it was over-priced then. It was a business model waiting for someone to come in and disrupt it as networking became the norm. What happened with NT was pretty classic Christensen-style disruption. Good enough for the bulk of new users and a lot less expensive than Novell. OOo and Linux are doing the same thing. Since then I'm surprised Novell kept enough customers to stay in business at all. I'm not sure they will stay in business now. Maybe Microsoft will buy them :-) Suse Linux owned by Microsoft. I remember when Acorn was dominating the schools market here and brought out the ARM processor. All the Acorn geeks had stickers on their computers with "Intel Outside" on them. Now Intel license ARM products mainly as a result of buying Digital who produced StrongArm. At some point Microsoft is going to end up selling services around Linux, it's more a matter of when than if. And probably Microsoft Office will at some point get ported to Linux. Microsoft will probably downsize its workforce through some sort of restructuring. Maybe break the company up into several smaller companies and some of those could go out of business without bringing the lot down. Might be next year, might be 5 years off but I think the tipping point has been reached some time ago where the changes are unstoppable. It's just timing now.




Another reader asked us to revisit the role of Corel, which we shall do shortly.

"To combat NSCP we have to have [sic] position the browser as ‘going away’ and do deeper integration on Windows. The stronger way to communicate this is to have a ‘new release’ of Windows and make a big deal out of it. We will thus position Memphis as ‘Windows 98'."

--Paul Maritz, Vice President, Microsoft

Recent Techrights' Posts

Why the Microsoft People Who Started SLAPPs Against Techrights Could Very Well be Sent Back to Prison
White-collar crime is also a crime
 
What statCounter Shows Today Helps Explain Microsoft's Helplessness, Mass Layoffs
Since many US journalists are already away on holiday almost nobody will dare ask the difficult questions or give a voice to whistleblowers
Microsoft Gets the Chop in South America
The notion of digital sovereignty gained a lot of popularity
Europe Has an 'Exit'
Let's see what happens the rest of this year
El Presidente Talks, Canada Walks (Away From Windows)
GNU/Linux rising
Cities in France and Germany Move to GNU/Linux and statCounter Detects Big Differences
Will governments lead by example?
Microsoft Lost Its Foothold in Africa
How many of these are "old" Windows machines converted to GNU/Linux? Probably a lot.
Led by Europe, GNU/Linux Makes Big Gains This Month
statCounter started showing new/fresh stats
Links 02/07/2025: Massive Microsoft Layoffs About to Commence, "Tesla's Robotaxi Program Is Failing"
Links for the day
The Company Run by Former (and Last Proper) Red Hat CEO, Promoting Microsoft Mono, Faces Shock as Senior Partner Jailed for 33 Sexual Offenses Including Pedophilia
"As reported by The Oxford Mail in April 2025, the offenses include rape, sexual assault, engaging in non-penetrative activity with a child, and more."
Microsoft Lost 29% of Windows Users, Based on Microsoft, Now Come Massive Layoffs
Microsoft collapse is today
Slopwatch: Google Serves to People Linux Slop and Linux FUD (Made by Bots)
"Slopwatch" finds it difficult to ignore Google's role in encouraging LLM slop
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 01, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 01, 2025
"Wayland People" Behave Like the Googles and Microsofts of This World
Published yesterday by Igor Ljubuncic
Gemini Links 02/07/2025: Arch Linux and Fulfillment in Gemini
Links for the day
Links 01/07/2025: "Independence Day in Taiwan", Bounties on Software Patents
Links for the day
What Happens When Your Law Firm is Preoccupied With Harassing and Trying to Extort a Humble Couple in Manchester, Even on Behalf of Violent Microsoft Staff From Another Continent
It's good to see that law firms which operate in bad faith are perishing
Lawyer X, Law Firm X and Elon Musk's X: scandals linked by Old Xaverian
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 01/07/2025: Distraction-Free Writing and Hytale Mismanagement
Links for the day
Links 01/07/2025: "Beauty of Blogging" and "Etiquette of Collapse"
Links for the day
Microsoft Uses LLM Slop to Defraud (or Rob) Shareholders
Microsoft is basically defrauding its shareholders by LLM slop
The Web is a Dead End
We need to adopt alternatives
When Words Lose Their Intended Meaning
examples of words that, at least in the technical spheres, don't mean what they sound like
People Who Disagree With You on Technical Matters May or May Not Agree With You on Political Things (But Usually They Do)
What bothers me a great deal is seeing left-leaning people accusing other left-leaning people of being "nazis"
"Too Much Choice" and "Too Many Programming Languages"
What IBM and its apologists aim for was attempted in the 1930s and it failed
Microsoft Lost 400,000,000 Windows Users, According to Microsoft
more people adopt smaller computers and many people replace Windows with GNU/Linux, as they don't really need a new computer
The "Davos Effect": Tarnishing the Reputation of Places Not by Overtourism But by Oligarch Infestation
The last Venice needs is an affiliation with Venetian oligarchs
Half a Year Gone, What's to Come Next
In the second half of 2025 we expect to be done with the Microsoft SLAPPs
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 30, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, June 30, 2025
People at the Very Top of Microsoft Know How Bad Things Really Are
There's no product that can replace the former profitability of Windows licensing and stuff that went on top of Windows
Gemini Links 01/07/2025: Mid Year and a Tour of Old Languages
Links for the day
EPO Presentation Bemoans Misuse of Slop in Decision-Making on Patents and in Classification (Which is Likely Illegal Too)
We habitually mention failed use cases of LLMs on the Web
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Confirmed, "XBox Hardware Is Dead"
It's possible that over 20% of the staff will be laid off
Links 30/06/2025: Kyrgyzstan vs Media Freedom, Dalai Lama Succession
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/06/2025: Backend Programs in Gemini and Dynamic Content Without The Scripting
Links for the day
Links 30/06/2025: Zuckerberg’s Tax-Evading Scheme Harms Kids, US Copyright Office Lacks Leadership
Links for the day
Microsoft Isn't Laying Off Tens of Thousands to 'Invest' in Slop ('Hey Hi'), It's Laying Off Tens of Thousands Because It's Running Out of Money (and Willing Lenders)
the layoffs are a sign of the business failing, not "hey hi" (whatever that is) replacing staff
Intel Lays Off 20% of Its Workforce, Microsoft is Doing the Same This Year
Like a yoyo, whatever goes up will come back down
Microsoft XBox Layoffs: Almost 2,000 Layoffs Became "Over 2,000"? (Over 20% of the Staff)
over 20% of staff will be let go, not counting staff that leaves voluntarily
GNU/Linux Rises to New Highs in Angola, Africa in General is Abandoning Windows
Western media barely covers Microsoft layoffs in Africa, but in recent years Microsoft culled the workforce and even shut down entire operations
Summer Plans in Techrights and Elsewhere
massive layoffs at Microsoft
Destination Geminispace (in the Age of LLM Slop and Slop Images That Infest the Web and Social Control Media)
Geminispace isn't vast, but at least it is - on average - a lot "cleaner"
GNU/Linux Growing in Sierra Leone This Year
Based on what statCounter is seeing, this year there are more and more people there who adopt GNU/Linux
Serial Sloppers Gonna Slop
More sites out there ought to call out the cheaters
Quartz (qz.com) is Spam and a Slopfarm
It used to be OK. Then they fired the staff.
Links 30/06/2025: US Economic Woes, Extreme Heat
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 29, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, June 29, 2025
Gemini Links 30/06/2025: "The AI Hype" and New AuraGem Ask
Links for the day