Summary: Champion of anti-competitive practices wants laws that further assist those practices

THE company from Redmond never changed. It's just an abusive monopoly which subverts the law in order to perpetuate this monopoly and evade prosecution when it breaks the law. As the i4i case (that's still in the news) helps show, Microsoft wants the law to bend over and always serve Microsoft, even become temporarily void when Microsoft breaks some particular law such as patent law. Watch how Microsoft's lobbying blog is once again pushing monopolies, this time on design. They try to use some cynical joke called "World Intellectual Property Day" (there is no such property) to push for further restrictions, using the same blog where they lobby for software patents:

Strong design protection in the online environment will help drive continued innovation and differentiation in the cloud.

They even use the "cloud" buzzword to pressure in favour of more monopolies. Who are they kidding? What an unethical company. See, that's what distinguishes companies like Google, for example, from Microsoft. Google is in many ways going against all those intellectual monopolies (copyright maximalists, artificial limitations and restrictions, patent lawyers, etc.), whereas Microsoft wants more protectionism. It's all about taking from society as much as possible when it comes to Microsoft. In fact, recall what Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer wanted to do to their colleague when he was ill. Ballmer may have just validated the story by making these statements:

On his recent discussion with Steve Ballmer about the book: No one has disagreed or contradicted any fact or any memory to me. … Steve said, “Yeah, those things did happen, some of those things did happen,” like I recount. I think obviously if you’re in a leadership position at Microsoft, and I’m giving my critique of the future, or the challenges for the future, I guess I should say, those are areas that Steve’s focused on, and is sensitive about, and he talked a little bit about that.

Guess who is using intellectual monopolies against Google right now? Microsoft has helped fuel copyright battles against Google and now it launches patent attacks on Android, too. A lot of sites will insist that Google and Microsoft are fundamentally different because at Microsoft, scarcity has always been the business model; for Google it's abundance. What is better for the public (over 99% of which is not lawyers)? ⬆