Summary: Microsoft personnel respawning under umbrellas that are seemingly subservient to Microsoft
A SAD reality we must all accept is that when a company filled with unethical people suddenly implodes, then those same unethical people that the company is comprised of end up infesting other companies that hire them. One example that we covered before is Visible Technologies, which is spying on people also on behalf of its client Microsoft. Visible Technologies was created with Microsoft funding and people. This includes former Microsoft data miners who are now spying on people and responding to them in blogs. They try to police coverage of companies like Microsoft. They call it "PR", which is a euphemism, and Microsoft has a whole bunch of these firms out there.
According to
the Microsoft-sponsored TechFlash, a Microsoft executive whose departure from Microsoft we wrote about before [
1,
2] and role in antitrust exhibits we saw
here, is becoming the CTO of Atigeo. It is a "data intelligence" (potential use is spying) company which is
already filled with the Microsoft family. It's like another one of those Microsoft offshoots near Redmond (a corporate reunion).
Bellevue-based Atigeo -- a 5-year-old data intelligence company -- has attracted two high-profile executives to lead technology and financial operations. Jawad Khaki, a longtime Microsoft executive who left the software giant last summer, has joined the company as chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering. At Microsoft, Khaki served as a corporate vice president in the Windows Group.
Meanwhile, Nathaniel "Buster" Brown -- the former chief financial officer at Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures -- has taken up that same position at the company. Brown already sits on the company's board.Atigeo is led by Michael Sandoval, the former Director of Partner Strategy at Microsoft and a former executive at AccessLine Communications.
There may be serious, uninvited compromises of privacy, which Microsoft has just violated in other ways that we will cover later on.
Moving on a little, based on
this new press release, Microsoft is
promoting anti-GNU/Linux FUDMeister, Susan Hauser. We
wrote about her a few weeks ago because she is no ordinary executive. It's a snake to GNU/Linux and she
gets to be a leader now, after
two decade in the company (that's a lot of time for indoctrination). She has been spreading lies and FUD against the competition (especially software patents FUD), which is how one gets promoted in the abusive, monopolistic company that is currently
suing TiVo (a Linux distributor). Microsoft is suing because its own rival to TiVo
is going nowhere and is fragmented. To whit:
The one thing that I don’t get and that Microsoft didn’t have a good answer for, is why is the company building up two separate products/interfaces (Mediaroom, Windows Media Center) that are designed to do very similar things?
Based on
the escape route of Rodriguez (Microsoft SVP), it's a messy technical affair that
articles continue to shed light on. Another Microsoft SVP, Veghte, very recently
quit the company, right after
a meeting with Microsoft's Ballmer. There is still mostly whitewashing of his character coming from the Microsoft de facto PR people [
1,
2,
3] (all the familiar names). It's like when someone passes away and suddenly nobody dares to say anything negative, probably "out of respect". Microsoft news is delivered almost exclusively by people whom Microsoft is pampering to become apologists.
Here is
another new appointment to note:
Wayne Guinn, Director of Finance for The National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS) has been named to the 2010 Microsoft Not For Profit Advisory Board.
"Non-profit accounting"... now, isn't
that a paradox? The conflicts of interests which this can generate are not too obvious, but the future might tell.
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Comments
dyfet
2010-01-25 19:42:34
The first thing our new Mitel division manager explained was that for technical people who have contact with customers, it was important that they are lied to so that they keep buying things so that our division manager's numbers would look good. There was a slow exodus of quality people, including myself, but before I left, I did get to have some fun at the company picnic. Someone had made sure his wife did not miss her invitation and the opportunity to participate as was intended. The poolside confrontation between wife, mistress, and this jerk in front of representatives of the Matushita board did seem rather amusing at the time.