Summary: The British PM allows himself to be associated with a company that engages in illegal activities

LAST year we showed that Bill Gates was professionally linked to Tony Blair. Like his predecessor, Gordon Brown has been mostly supportive of Microsoft's monopoly (BECTA is a good example), so the following new report about him visiting a convicted software monopolist is not surprising at all:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited Microsoft’s London headquarters in Victoria for what his campaign managers had dubbed as the 'Peoples' PMQs'.

Members of the public sent in questions through Twitter, Facebook, MSN and the Labour Party Web site. There were also a few questions from the studio audience.

Given the huge overlap between Microsoft executives and BBC executives [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (the BBC typically repeats the British government's positions rather than challenge any), it is not surprising that the BBC was promoting Microsoft's Natal earlier this year, despite it being pretty much a copycat that will never catch on for the reasons explained in this new essay from Arizona University.

In video games, merit can be found in motion control. At the beginning of this home console generation, Microsoft and Sony opted to win the sales race with high-definition powerhouses while Nintendo gambled with its innovative motion-controlled system.

[...]

This is evidenced by the company inviting media members to test Project Natal instead of the mass gaming audience. It’s shown through developer support for the platform, not consumer survey results. Microsoft hasn’t gobbled up popular developers and their related gaming franchises, it hasn’t published any large-scale customer feedback and it hasn’t asked its online subscribers how they feel about Project Natal. Everywhere you look, Microsoft caters to anyone but you.

Xbox in general is going nowhere. The US and British press paint a different picture though, for obvious reasons (the "special relationship"). ⬆