Microsoft is cooking the books (see our reports about Microsoft's financial manipulations and abuses) and is changing the way it reports financial results to its investors yet again, making year-to-year (or quarter-to-quarter) analyses virtually impossible. Well, after reporting billions in losses in the last quarter one can understand the effort to dodge bad publicity for the second time in a row. The company has just been downgraded by Citigroup.

"As Microsoft continues to fall into the abyss expect it to try to drag the competition down too."Android and Linux are selling a lot more than Windows, or put another way, newly-sold devices running Linux easily outnumber devices running Windows. Microsoft, which is nowhere outside of the aging x86/Wintel empire, was hoping to disrupt ARM but failed miserably (its products got cancelled). ARM is where Free software tends to thrive (it's a Linux turf), but Microsoft pretends people need it to certify ARM with Microsoft. What a bizarre infiltration and an effort to enter the "IoT" hype (billions of devices) from the back door...

Speaking of infiltrations, Mesos and Microsoft get even closer right now [1, 2, 3]. Readers may recall that Microsoft is likely to take over Mesos/Mesosphere, based on recent reports. It's about proprietary software, but it's being falsely advertised as "open" (openwashing).

As Microsoft continues to fall into the abyss expect it to try to drag the competition down too. It means that Linux in particular ought to watch out. Microsoft is not an ally, not even an ally of convenience. ⬆

"I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter."

--InfoWorld Editor Nicholas Petreley