Summary: Without any disclosure, Gartenberg's smears continue to be disseminated by IDG, which cares about traffic rather than accuracy and conflicts of interests (Gartenberg is a former Microsoft employee)

Microsoft Evangelist Michael Gartenberg is doing his annual "anti-GNU/Linux" [1, 2]. Gartenberg, who has been working for Microsoft for years (sometimes on the payroll directly), is publishing lies about GNU/Linux at least once a year and IDG not only publishes this in one site; it even modifies the headline and posts it another site, only to receive somewhat angry responses from people who can call "FUD" when they see it. Here is one such response:

I am seriously annoyed by the constant disingenuous articles that state GNU/Linux is not ready for the average user’s desktop PC as the primary, or only, operating system. What a dump truck load of manure! The majority of the people making such spurious claims are usually ignorant end-users, clueless “reporters”, Microsoft fanatics or Apple worshippers. I am not sure which of these categories may contain Mr. Gartenberg. But I suspect it is one or more of the above. If not, then someone point out to me just exactly where Mr. Gartenberg stands in the operating systems wars. Yes, these are wars. If you do not believe that, fine. You can be wrong if you want to.

This FUD is nothing to be upset about. It's just one of those routine things from the Microsoft ecosystem. "The MicroShills Are At It Again," writes another person:

It’s almost impossible to read anything from the mainline computer press that does not have the hard and heavy thumbprint of Microsoft on it. We get it. You all depend on Microsoft for your continued existence, so all articles pointed at them will be heavily slanted in their favor, and, every once in a great while, when Microsoft really screws the pooch, the sarcastic remarks and criticism can fly, but only for so long. (If you don’t believe this, you aren’t paying attention. Also, gander at the amount of criticism Vista got, and then there were a load of articles saying how no one – not even them – really gave Vista a chance, and it wasn’t that bad. Then, magically, when Windows 7 started looking halfway good, and Microsoft itself admitted what a pig Vista was, again it was alright to criticize again.)

Now, it’s Bing. Bing is acceptable as a search engine – for anyone that has never used Google, or Yahoo, for that matter.

But the press is beating us with the “gains” of Bing in the market every time they show up. Enough already.

He then refers to US-only figures (that roughly quadruple Microsoft's real presence in several areas of computing) which come from Microsoft's business partner, ComScore [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. He also does not mention the fact that Microsoft is losing over $2 billion per year because market share gets bought, not earned (see Verizon for example [1, 2]) ⬆