11.22.13
The Danger of Microsoft Moles Still Largely Underestimated
More beneath the surface…
Summary: It may take many Elops before society as a whole can recognise Microsoft’s danger/threat to jobs, productivity, innovation, and plurality in the technology sector
WHEN Microsoft moles start to take over something they typically get the job done. In the case of Nokia, Yahoo and Novell, where the companies are fairly large, the hijack (completion of the job) can take several years to complete. The vulture just keeps circling the prey, weakening it by driving away resistance. Microsoft has been trying to infiltrate and in some hopeful sense take over FOSS, sometimes with the help of proxies set up by former Microsoft marketing managers for whom Indian ‘news’ (PR) sites are kindly reposting press releases with very slight edits. This helps the takeover. To a certain degree, Microsoft has been successful, even while simultaneously suing FOSS using patents. Another company which has been taking over by many former executives from Microsoft is VMware, whose former manager, who had come from Microsoft, became a manager at the Linux Foundation just earlier this month.
Don’t lose sight of Microsoft. The vulture is void of ethics and it’s always looking for the next kill. Nokia was a top Linux contributor before Microsoft killed it (just days ago the takeover became official). █
Needs Sunlight said,
November 22, 2013 at 7:25 am
The list of moles in other companies is getting disturbingly long. It also has had an adverse effect on each of these companies making them less competitive and less innovative. Depending on their market, they can even be less popular. Canonical is an example where the closer they’ve moved to M$, the more of their community / market they have alienated. If people want enterprise support, without M$ they’ll go with Red Hat. If they are big fans of M$, they’ll go with the worst Novell Suse. If they want a community distro, they will go with one like Fedora, Debian or Mageia where the community has not been squashed or dismissed.