08.31.09
Microsoft Insider/Partner Warns All That Microsoft “Destroys” Partners
Summary: FASA Interactive warns about getting involved with Microsoft and Tuxera should listen
IN an exclusive little interview, Microsoft got blasted for “destroying” companies that it bought. According to gamesindustry.biz:
FASA Interactive founder Jordan Weisman has spoken out about Microsoft’s acquisition of his highly-regarded studio, saying that the corporation “destroyed” its development culture and came close to doing the same with Halo developer Bungie.
“When Microsoft bought FASA Interactive and incorporated it into Microsoft… the two reasons they bought us was, one, they wanted the catalogue of intellectual properties and, two, they felt that we had developed a really good development culture. And the reality is that, pretty much from the day we moved to Redmond, that development culture was destroyed,” Weisman told GamesIndustry.biz.
Needless to say, the above has generated a lot of reactions, even from the Microsoft fan sites:
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, the man who founded FASA Interactive bashed Microsoft for ultimately killing his video-game studio and nearly doing the same to famed “Halo” developer Bungie Studios.
Jordan Weisman said Microsoft “destroyed” the development culture at FASA when the software giant acquired it in 1999. It became part of Microsoft Game Studios and developed Windows and Xbox games until Microsoft closed FASA in 2007 during cutbacks.
The above must come as no surprise. Cisco has already found this out and the same goes for the Bungie Studios affair (mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4]). How about Ensemble Studios and Flight Simulator? Others have complaints about it too. A film director said more or less the same thing and workers can't say the truth about the products. As employees of RazorFish found out [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], integration with Microsoft can spell doom. One must never forget what Microsoft had done to Yahoo! before the original management was overthrown.
To serve as a lesson for the future, here is some more coverage of this latest debacle:
- Mechwarrior maker claims Microsoft ‘destroyed’ studio’s culture
- FASA’s Dev Culture Was ‘Destroyed’ By Microsoft
- Mechwarrior Creator Advises Against Selling Rights to Games
- Microsoft Destroyed FASA’s Development Culture
- Microsoft ‘destroyed’ FASA culture, but I defended Bungie, Weisman tells all
- FASA founder accuses Microsoft
Weisman says that Bungie’s culture was better defended, and the developer says he even wanted the firm left in Chicago; efforts which ultimately failed.
“I tried to convince them to leave Bungie in Chicago, but not winning that I did succeed in getting them to put them in a walled off room, which didn’t follow any of the other Microsoft stuff. We were much better able to defend Bungie’s culture than we were FASA’s culture.”
This is something to remember when calling Microsoft a “great partner”, as Tuxera just did [1, 2, 3, 4]. At Groklaw, Jones wrote: “Hahahaha. “Great partner”… with open source… Microsoft… (cough, choke, tears streaming down face from laughing so hard… benefiting consumers…ha ha ) They should talk to Novell. Or i4i, for that matter. Let me translate, according to the way my brain reads this: Microsoft has some money. Tuxera, an allegedly open source company, is willing to act excited about access to proprietary drivers to make money. It’s just business. Here’s what it isn’t: it isn’t open source to me.”
Carla wrote some more about the Tuxera issue:
This little scenario also highlights the weakness of Free Software– Free hardware. Not free of cost, but open, hackable, and unencumbered by junk patents, silly licenses, and sneaky stuff. Yesterday I wrote about the new official exFAT filesystem for SDXC storage media. To the SD Card Association exFAT, which is FAT64, probably seemed like a natural evolution from FAT32 and FAT16. To me it looks like a chummy industry consortium all propping each other up and helping each other extract excess money for the privilege of using their products.
It takes a lot more money to launch and maintain hardware, so there are few Free Hardware projects. Next week I’m going to follow up with a roundup of Free Hardware projects, and naturally you are invited to chime in with your own suggestions.
Nobody knows what made Tuxera say the things it did. But Microsoft is a bad partner based on its very own track record. █
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