11.18.10

Gemini version available ♊︎

Facebook Becomes Like Microsoft’s Hotmail 2.0

Posted in Google, Mail, Microsoft at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Scoble and Zuckerberg
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg
with former Microsoft evangelist (source: Robert Scoble)

Summary: Over time, Facebook becomes more like a rebranding of Microsoft (another label on Microsoft services, akin to Yahoo! search in America)

Microsoft cannot create decent products. To quote Arno Edelmann, Microsoft’s European business security product manager, “[u]sually Microsoft doesn’t develop products, we buy products.” There are many examples. Hotmail, which failed after Microsoft had acquired it (in an attempt to buy its way into E-mail domination), is falling into oblivion despite overhaul attempts. On the Web, Microsoft continues to lose close to $3 billions every single year. That cannot qualify as a success story, can it? Even Windows figures are faked, but that’s another story.

Having found itself well behind the competition in social networks, Microsoft bought part of Facebook a few years back (see our posts about Facebook). Microsoft did attempt to buy the whole of Facebook, but a lot of people do not know this. On an inter-personal basis, Microsoft and Facebook are close friends too and both are patent bullies. Facebook’s founder hangs out with the world’s biggest patent troll, who is Microsoft’s former CTO.

In any case, just so that everyone keeps abreast of the latest developments around Microsoft Office Web Apps, it seems like there’s a true Microsoft-Facebook tag-team act which mimics Google Apps/Mail. Earlier this year we warned that Facebook was becoming an enemy of OpenDocument Format (ODF); instead of promoting open standards, Facebook decided to increase Microsoft lock-in and spread it further through its users. Here is news about that:

What Facebook Didn’t Mention: Microsoft Office Web Apps Come to New Messaging Platform

[...]

Facebook’s newly announced messaging platform will deeply integrate Microsoft’s Office Web Apps so that Facebook users can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments without having to leave the site. Rumors about this integration started to make the rounds on the Internet last week. Oddly, though, Facebook didn’t mention this integration during today’s press conference and makes no mention of it in the official announcement on its corporate blog.

So without buying the whole of Facebook, Microsoft is already dangling Mark Zuckerberg (to whom Facebook users are “dumb fucks”) like a marionette, turning those “dumb fucks” as Mark calls them into Microsoft sheep. Glyn Moody has just challenged Mark to remember where he came from.

Microsoft’s Office documents are already the dominant formats used around the world – a position that Microsoft has worked long and hard to protect. The rise of ODF as an alternative is a hopeful sign that things can change, but let’s not delude ourselves: it is still used by only a small minority, and it is a constant battle to get the format accepted more widely.

That battle just got harder, thanks to Facebook’s decision to integrate Microsoft Office formats into Messages in this way. It makes it much easier to share Microsoft documents than those created with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, say. Given the huge following that Facebook has – especially amongst the younger generation – that’s a really big problem for free software and its future.

So we need to ask Mark Zuckerberg support open formats, too. Why do I think he might listen? Well, for a start, because of the following statement to be found on the Facebook developers site:

Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software.

Facebook might never have been created without the existence of zero-cost open source tools that allowed Zuckerberg and his mates to hack together some code easily and quickly when they came up with their idea. It wouldn’t have grown and flourished to its current impressive scale if it had needed to buy ever-more licences for the software that it uses to run its huge infrastructure.

Without Free software, Mark would probably still be in some dormitory or a drop-out after the disciplinary committee chastised and maybe prosecuted him for his offences on campus (this is a story which Facebook has successfully buried over the years, keeping it off the public eye).

Being a prisoner of Facebook increasingly seems like being stuck in a mythical “Hotmail 2.0″ that is just another platform with which Microsoft can manipulate and spy on (yes, Facebook gives its data to Microsoft) many Web users. Professor Eben Moglen is very concerned about Facebook, which he views as a top threat to freedom.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Reddit
  • email

Decor ᶃ Gemini Space

Below is a Web proxy. We recommend getting a Gemini client/browser.

Black/white/grey bullet button This post is also available in Gemini over at this address (requires a Gemini client/browser to open).

Decor ✐ Cross-references

Black/white/grey bullet button Pages that cross-reference this one, if any exist, are listed below or will be listed below over time.

Decor ▢ Respond and Discuss

Black/white/grey bullet button If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

A Single Comment

  1. twitter said,

    November 18, 2010 at 10:13 pm

    Gravatar

    OOXML on Facebook is a lead balloon. So far, Microsoft’s silly “web app” Office requires the user to have M$ Office installed locally. If Microsoft insists on doing this, they bump off hype Phone and Android users, exactly the users they care about. If Facebook does some kind of pdf work around, they will probably display other document formats as easily. It is too bad that Facebook did not implement the patent and royalty free ODF standards first but demand is unlikely. The most important fail factor is that no one wants to see M$ Office on Facebook any more than their usual corporate slave work. Facebook is supposed to be for friends and conversations, spied on though they are. People who want to share fun work have better options than a $400 text editor and may or may not try to organize it on Facebook. Microsoft heard about KDE 4′s integrated social desktop and came up with this? Things don’t get less credible. The failure of this move is as predictable as the fail will be quick.

DecorWhat Else is New


  1. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 04, 2023

    IRC logs for Sunday, June 04, 2023



  2. Links 04/06/2023: Unifont 15.0.05 and PCLinuxOS Stuff

    Links for the day



  3. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Wayland and the Old Computer Challenge

    Links for the day



  4. StatCounter: GNU/Linux (Including ChromeOS) Grows to 8% Market Share Worldwide

    This month’s numbers from StatCounter are good for GNU/Linux (including ChromeOS, which technically has both GNU and Linux); the firm assesses logs from 3 million sites and shows Windows down to 66% in desktops/laptops (a decade ago it was above 90%) with modest growth for GNU/Linux, which is at an all-time high, even if one does not count ChromeOS that isn’t freedom- or privacy-respecting



  5. Journalism Cannot and Quite Likely Won't Survive on the World Wide Web

    We’re reaching the point where the overwhelming majority of new pages on the Web (the World Wide Web) are basically junk, sometimes crafted not by humans; how to cope with this rapid deterioration is still an unknown — an enigma that demands hard answers or technical workarounds



  6. Do Not Assume Pensions Are Safe, Especially When Managed by Mr. EPOTIF Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos

    With the "hoax" that is the financial assessment by António Campinos (who is deliriously celebrating the inauguration of illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo courts) we urge EPO workers to check carefully the integrity of their pensions, seeing that pension promises have been broken for years already



  7. Links 04/06/2023: Why Flatpak and Wealth of Devices With GNU/Linux

    Links for the day



  8. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Rosy Crow 1.1.3 and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

    Links for the day



  9. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 03, 2023

    IRC logs for Saturday, June 03, 2023



  10. Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

    Links for the day



  11. Links 03/06/2023: Qubes OS 4.2.0 RC1 and elementaryOS Updates for May

    Links for the day



  12. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

    Links for the day



  13. Links 03/06/2023: IBM Betraying LibreOffice Some More (After Laying off LibreOffice Developers)

    Links for the day



  14. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Bubble Woes and Zond Updates

    Links for the day



  15. Links 03/06/2023: Apache NetBeans 18 and ArcaOS 5.0.8

    Links for the day



  16. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 02, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 02, 2023



  17. The Developing World Abandons Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux at All-Time Highs on Desktops/Laptops

    Microsoft, with 80 billion dollars in longterm debt and endless layoffs, is losing the monopolies; the media doesn’t mention this, but some publicly-accessible data helps demonstrate that



  18. Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft's Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

    Links for the day



  19. Linux Foundation 'Research' Has a New Report and Of Course It Uses Only Proprietary Software

    The Linux Foundation has a new report, promoted by Clickfraud Spamnil and others; of course they’re rejecting Free software, they’re just riding the “Linux” brand and speak of “Open Source” (which they reject themselves)



  20. Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

    Links for the day



  21. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Vimwiki Revisited, SGGS Revisited

    Links for the day



  22. Geminispace/GemText/Gemini Protocol Turn 4 on June 20th

    Gemini is turning 4 this month (on the 20th, according to the founder) and I thought I’d do a spontaneous video about how I use Gemini, why it's so good, and why it’s still growing (Stéphane Bortzmeyer fixed the broken cron job — or equivalent of it — a day or two after I had mentioned the issue)



  23. HMRC Does Not Care About Tax Fraud Committed by UK Government Contractor, Sirius 'Open Source'

    The tax crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ were reported to HMRC two weeks ago; HMRC did not bother getting back to the reporters (victims of the crime) and it’s worth noting that the reporters worked on UK government systems for many years, so maybe there’s a hidden incentive to bury this under the rug



  24. Our IRC at 15th Anniversary

    So our IRC community turns 15 today (sort of) and I’ve decided to do a video reflecting on the fact that some of the same people are still there after 15 years



  25. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 01, 2023

    IRC logs for Thursday, June 01, 2023



  26. Links 02/06/2023: NixOS 23.05 and Rust 1.70.0

    Links for the day



  27. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Flying High With Gemini and Gogios Released

    Links for the day



  28. Links 01/06/2023: KStars 3.6.5 and VEGA ET1031 RISC-V Microprocessor in Use

    Links for the day



  29. Gemini Links 01/06/2023: Scam Call and Flying High With Gemini

    Links for the day



  30. Links 01/06/2023: Spleen 2.0.0 Released and Team UPC Celebrates Its Own Corruption

    Links for the day


RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

Recent Posts