Earlier on we wrote about Microsoft using its patents offensively. It keeps claiming to be a victim, but it's nothing more than double-speak -- a case of buttering both sides of the toast. Since Microsoft sues using its patents in an unprecedented fashion, people begin to react. There is nothing extraordinary here, but Microsoft tried to justify going hostile.
Crimes Microsoft Gets Away With - So Far
News publications are cautious about making accusations, and because of that, some nasty acts of Microsoft are essentially being erased from the record.
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Microsoft convinced Baystar Capital to put $50 Million dollars into SCO's lawsuit against IBM and other Open Source users, and promised to "backstop" Baystar's investment if SCO lost money, according to this sworn testimony. But I'm told that one person's testimony, even sworn testimony, isn't proof.
“The road to OOXML has been riddled with Microsoft corruption.”Some of the examples given there are from the OOXML fiasco. We wrote about this earlier today. A ZDNet article now cites CompTIA. It's a Microsoft lobbying arm that fought for OOXML (Van Der Beld [1, 2, 3], anyone?). Total loss of credibility there, for sure! History is being rewritten.
The road to OOXML has been riddled with Microsoft corruption. From start to finish. It is all well documented. Interestingly enough, they also quote Microsoft's Oliver Bell, who seemed to be concerned with BoycottNovell's exposure of the corruption (he asked about us). Gray Gray Knowlton too was concerned. Might they end up escaping the company like others already have following the embarrassment and breaking of laws?
The EC has yet to slap Microsoft with heavy fines when the investigation is complete. The market cannot take care of itself when abuse becomes the 'norm'.
--Richard Stallman, June 2008
Comments
mike
2008-07-31 23:15:01
They certainly seem to keep diligently reporting FUD and outright lies from the big boys all the time.
It probably has more to do with paid for bias (e.g. advertising, swag), bullying (e.g. threats - they all must pay ms a lot for crap software), just wanting to 'back the winner' (in the us particularly people seem to want to associate with the richest, no matter how they got there), or downright laziness (they have slick pr pieces from their own 'pr newswire' and similar services which are cheap 'news').
aeshna23
2008-07-31 23:34:14
Stephane Rodriguez
2008-08-01 06:23:40
It's even simpler than that. Microsoft pays big for getting anything they want to say to the world through wire news, AP/Reuters/AFP/...
Whatever gets in the wire reaches all press around the world.
Since journalists don't investigate, most of the time they republish the wire news itself.
Microsoft sponsorship of press, magazines isn't even useful here.
That's just a very efficient top-down flow of daily Microsoft PR that targets their customers and governments. It is much more powerful than blogs. Especially when blogs are negative, while Microsoft is positive. Facing choice, customers favor the latter.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-08-01 06:33:09
Stephane Rodriguez
2008-08-01 09:09:40