02.21.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft Inside — Part I: Don’t Get Close to Microsoft, It’s Not a Love Story
As Sir Humphrey Appleby famously said in Yes Minister: “It is necessary to get behind someone in order to stab them in the back.”
Summary: Today we start a mini series about how Microsoft plans to ‘deal’ with GNU/Linux (of course while pretending to “love” it; that’s just a very old modus operandi of Microsoft)
THERE is a tendency to wrongly assume that Microsoft is not trying to kill GNU/Linux (probably because it cannot anymore; it’s almost too late). Nothing would please Microsoft more than killing GNU/Linux and pushing Windows to fill the newly-created gap; the whole “Microsoft loves Linux” thing is “sour grapes” in reverse; they lost the battle (in most areas or form factors), so they pretend to be happy about it regardless (and want to steal a share of the pie, e.g. with Azure). As we keep reminding people, Windows is fast becoming minority market share in more segments of the market, with desktops/laptops being a last-remaining stronghold (that monopoly too is waning as Windows rapidly drops in share). They don’t like to admit this, so they rely on biased and ridiculously selective measures (to make the shareholders think they maintain about 90% of “the market”). The takeover of GitHub wasn’t just expensive; it’s an ongoing money burner with no signs of turnaround (GitHub is “successful” in the same sense Uber is). They bought it in an attempt to occupy the competition (spying, imposing disproportionate censorship, undermining one way or another). If they don’t pull it off, it’ll be another write-off like Nokia. More losses. Remember that last year Microsoft shed off a lot of staff, including in supposedly “successful” divisions like Azure. There were layoffs and Microsoft is exceptionally paranoid about its clients and shareholders finding out.
“In this series we will share some stories we’ve heard throughout the month. Microsoft has some rather malicious plans and by explaining those plans we hope to ‘inoculate’ the community, developing a sort of “herd immunity” (to the tactics or the generic strategy).”Earlier today I caught up with video coverage about what Microsoft had done to the Raspberry Pi. Having already seen plenty of articles about it (almost 50 articles, not even counting forum threads, social control media, comments and so on), I belatedly turned to video coverage. It takes a lot more time to digest video as it cannot be ‘scanned’ like text. I’m pleased that we at Techrights were the ones to break the story — a fact publicly recognised even at the front page of Raspbian. Following that revelation of ours a lot of the media brought highlights and spotlights to the backlash, putting intense pressure on Raspberry Pi (Foundation), which instead of making things better only made things worse, at least in the short term, probably due to secret contractual obligations. Half a decade ago we did the same to Lenovo, which resorted to censorship of customers (because Lenovo didn’t want to change its misguided policy, at least not immediately). Based on what happened with Lenovo (in years that followed it gradually warmed up to GNU/Linux, even if just to avoid the hate) our prediction is that if Raspberry Pi has some potential for expanding a Microsoft partnership, it would give that a pass. They hopefully learned their lesson/s; Microsoft tried something similar several years ago (putting Windows on Pi devices). That’s just how corporations work (even if they call themselves “foundation” instead of “limited”) and engaging with them on a financial level and PR level is the only way to accomplish something. I know this having spent like half a decade of my life (at expense to myself and my health) opposing Novell. It worked. It really worked. A decade or so later Novell's last CEO still feels hurt by the whole thing.
In this series we will share some stories we’ve heard throughout the month. Microsoft has some rather malicious plans and by explaining those plans we hope to ‘inoculate’ the community, developing a sort of “herd immunity” (to the tactics or the generic strategy). The patterns are mostly familiar, we’ve covered some of these before (e.g. EDGI), but they merit emphasis in light of new examples, not a supposedly ‘old Microsoft’ but this year’s Microsoft. █
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