Summary: Corporate media, funded by companies that nonchalantly oppress people, would have us believe there’s something wrong with people who reject corporate masters in their computing; reality, however, suggests that it is a wholly false narrative induced or cemented by endless repetition, so this framing ought to be rejected outright
THE potential power of projection tactics is often underestimated at peril or risk to ourselves; yesterday we showed how scammers claim to be the victims of "scammers", and in the context of GNU/Linux we habitually see accusations against its users (or developers) that shamelessly distract from the accusers’ own behaviour. To give just one example, which is probably recent enough to remember, IBM claims to be saving lives when IBM is in fact partly responsible for history’s worst genocides and racism against blacks. Where does IBM summon this audacity to accuse anybody of racism???
In the previous post (“The Free Software Community Needs Solidarity and Stronger Resistance Against Corporate Oligopolies With Their Overlapping Interests”), which is discussed in the video above, we show the extent/lengths to which this sort of spin can go; they have money and they dominate the media (using the media’s thirst for cash), so they get to control some ‘coin-operated’ liars in ‘journalist’ clothing. They shame grassroots communities while hailing racist corporations. When they’re confronted over their lies they proceed to claim to have been “trolled” by some “rude” people. Who provoked who?
“Their goal is to scuttle anything that’s not serving their sponsors.”This is a very common strategy of narrative inversion; the abuser, which is well rewarded financially for the abuse, claims to be the victim of “abuse”; we oughtn’t fall for it. Because if we do, then they will split us apart and spit into our well. Their goal is to scuttle anything that’s not serving their sponsors.
We could go on and name some of the culprits (publishers, authors, etc.) but keeping the description generic enough is probably beneficial as it averts unneeded controversy and sidesteps accusations of ad hominem attacks (which is actually what those culprits themselves are doing). Spotting the projection tactics is always worthwhile because it makes responses/rebuttals a lot easier. In due course, if liars walk away because they’re rebutted effectively, they may refrain from doing more of the same, as guilt and shame tend to accompany dishonesty.
I’ve been doing advocacy for Free software since my early twenties and I’ve seen plenty of these liars (or corporate spinners) walking away, vanishing abruptly or gradually. We hardly hear the name “Enderle” anymore and publication volume in sites like ZDNet is decreasing. The thing about chronic lying is, overdoing it diminishes the impact and over time the incentive to do that just isn’t there anymore.
Our hope is that the likes of IBM will quit trolling the community and defaming people; we see what proxies (if not employees then media that they pay) engage in defamation, and the financial harm caused by retaliation from communities may beget cessation. In Microsoft’s case, they’ve become more clever in the way they attack or belittle GNU/Linux because they’ve come to realise that FUD is detrimental to sales (many of their customers also use GNU/Linux). Vigilance certainly goes a long way and pointing out errors discourages repetition of these errors (or intentional lies).
One way to help the Free software cause is to respond and correct; if claims are being made of all sorts of “isms”, then we need to examine the underlying evidence and if there’s insufficient evidence we can talk about it. A lot of the time we may find hypocrisy and double standards from the accusers (projection) and talking about it publicly can certainly discourage repetition. It really does work!
Remember that 15 years ago we focused on responding to lies told by Microsoft and Novell. Over time they shifted the targets, moved the goalposts, and changed their story. At the end Novell simply collapsed and Microsoft’s dream of universal “Linux tax” didn’t work out. It only temporarily worked to a certain extent and now they’re incapable of suing companies over patents in relation to “Linux” because it would cause a massive backlash and customer exodus. Microsoft still hates Linux, but it cannot say so publicly. Microsoft still fights against the GPL (see Copilot), but it is paying the SFC to infiltrate events about copyleft and hijack keynote slots. There is an extensive campaign of deception and we should be too wise to fall for it. The better we prepare to confront the deception, the less likely this deception is to recur. At some point it goes away completely. Then we win… the argument. █
IBM attacks what it cannot understand (or cannot control)
Summary: Ever since IBM bought Red Hat it has repeatedlyattacked the FSF (in a malicious and personified fashion), looking for its own ‘copyright grab’ whilst outsourcing loads of code to proprietary software monopolisers who attack the GPL; by doing so, IBM is destroying the value of what it paid more than 30 billion dollars for (IBM is governed by pretentious fools, according to IBM insiders; they’ve already lost Red Hat’s longtime CEO and IBM’s new President), so it’s falling back on openwashing of IBM's proprietary software with help from the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation
Summary: The “Mafia” that destroyed the EPO is still being put in charge and is using the EPO for shameless self-promotion; it is never being held accountable, not even when courts demand remediatory action and staff seeks reparations
AN anonymous source told us and showed us that the EPO‘s staff union is planning action to compel António Campinos to obey courts and hold Benoît Battistelliet al accountable for their abuses, which remain untackled. Can a law school be managed by a criminal? Welcome to France, the true home of Campinos! Endless harm continues to be caused by Battistelli’s associates and right now the EPO’s Web site, in its latest “news” item, is boosting Battistelli’s CEIPI (Campinos and Battistelli swapped seats) as if the EPO is still being run for or by this guy from the shadows. Towards the end of the video we also show the overlapping agenda.
The EPO cannot move on until it handles or repairs the past. Shutting tightly a closet with skeletons (while occasionally adding yet more skeletons to it) is assurance that when the bubble implodes it will be truly devastating. It’s like a pressure cooker. Nothing at all has been resolved. Campinos has repeatedly shown that he’s incapable of doing so and he’s still being sort of ‘bossed’ by the fits of Team Battistelli. This is terrible, but what’s even more terrible is the grotesque silence in the media, in effect enabling the crimes and becoming passively complicit. █
I’ve intentionally limited my personal thoughts (relegated to the above video). The text below is correspondence between Mr. Lewis and a Techrights associate, who had read drafts of the article before it was published yesterday.
“I thought Microsoft was never, ever first to market,” the associate noted. “They only ever copied, and slowly and poorly at that. What they can do is implant false memories, of sorts, so that the market and then individuals forget that there was ever something better. Take Kerberos+LDAP. It was the primary way to manage identities and authentication and occupied the niche that Microsoft aimed to destroy with Active Directory. Once they started pushing Active Directory, which was about 20 years ago, it couldn’t handle more than a half dozen accounts at a time yet all the microsofters, followed by the trade press, parroted the line that there was nothing on the market to manage identities and authentication. Same when they aimed to destroy e-mail with the Outlook+Exchange combination, they started parroting that there was no competing product. Well, given how many functions and capabilities were lacking from both, maybe they were partially right, but in spite of that, there were quite a few much higher quality, established MUC and MTAs. The list goes on.”
“The text below is correspondence between Mr. Lewis and a Techrights associate, who had read drafts of the article before it was published yesterday.”“When I say that Microsoft only dominates when they are first to market,” Mr. Lewis responded, “I mean that Microsoft only dominates markets when it enters them in its infancy and that they’re almost always dead in the water when a market is already dominated.”
“Ok,” our associate responded, “but which markets was Microsoft ever early to enter? As far as I recall, they’ve only ever followed and slowly at that. Steve Jobs used to rib them on both the slowness and the bad quality. I want to know if I’ve missed an area, but otherwise the statement implying that they have ever been first to market should be walked back.”
“I can’t recall a single area where they were first to market or, for that matter, even early to enter a market: DOS (CP/M, AppleDOS), GUI (GEM, DESQview, Lisa), Shell (Bash, Ksh), WordProcessing (WordStar, WordPerfect), SpreadSheets (Visicalc, 1-2-3, Quattro), Databases (dBaseII – dBaseIII, FoxBase), E-Mail Clients (Eudora, Pine), E-Mail Server (sendmail, postfix, exim, et al), Presentation Graphics (Harvard Graphics, Freelance Graphics), Desktop Publishing (PageMaker, QuarkXPress), OOP (java, python), Developer tools (Borland, Eclipse, Emacs), Web Browsers (Mosaic, Netscape), Web Server (Apache), Web Design (Dreamweaver, HotMetal, Emacs), Music Player (iPod), SmartPhone (iPhone, Android), Hosted Services (AWS, GoogleCloud, Nebula), Document Formats (ODF), etc. Maybe my memory is getting too rusty, that’s all I can think of. I would add that even when Microsoft did introduce a product into the market, that it was usually be at least a few more years until the product became usable enough to become recognizable.”
One has to be a little more “senior” to know or recall those products. Some of the above I’ve never heard of myself. For Microsoft it is a lot easier to charm or bamboozle the younger generation, with a swath of revisionism and press entryism. I’m still in my thirties, so some of the above brands I only know from young childhood.
“I know the story of Novell and IBM.”“There is a factual error,” our associate noted about the article. “Microsoft business strategy cannot be dependent on them being among the first movers in a market because they never are and never have been among the first. They are always slow in getting on their feet. Their business model has been nearly 100% dependent on illegally leveraging their OEM and Desktop monopolies as well as their monopoly on productivity suite file formats. tldr: it is a lie to assert that Microsoft is a first mover.”
As we do not edit/censor articles, in respect to their original authors, we’ve decided that instead a response to this article will follow. We ended up making two videos.
Mr. Lewis, who received this feedback prior to publication (finalisation), defended his position by stating: “Most of the markets that Microsoft entered into were in their infancy, wide open for the taking, and were anyone’s game. They didn’t have an AWS to compete with in the OS, Server, and Productivity markets like Azure does. To their credit, they did PCs better than IBM ever could. But taking out Novell and Lotus when the market was infinitesimally smaller than it is today was inevitable; they could barely put up a fight.”
I know the story of Novell and IBM. I do not agree with those statements and I’ve responded to them in the video (along the way).
“As they were doing this,” Mr. Lewis concluded, “they were relying on various tactics, from anticompetitive to creative, to dominate these young markets and maintain this domination to this day albeit losing ground everywhere now.”
“I saw nothing creative over the last four decades in their uniformly illegal and dishonest tactics,” our associate responded. “They gained a desktop monopoly from IBM which at the time was forced by the DOJ to choose between hardware and software. IBM chose hardware and thus handed, via Bill’s mother, Microsoft a monopoly on a silver platter. Microsoft then used Kildall’s work, via Paterson for chump change, and pawned it off as their own. BASIC was gained by dumpster diving and pawned off as if their own. Etc.”
“Even their gains in the productivity suite market were due entirely to the desktop monopoly rents which were used to underwrite the apparent price dumping. They undercut WordPerfect and Quattro by at least half. Blocking DR-DOS was also only enabled by their monopoly.
“The only somewhat new market Microsoft entered was the browser market, which though short in years already had a great many independent web browsers before Bill got around to ripping off Spyglass Mosaic. Now that, I must admit was creative because they agreed with Spyglass Mosaic on price based on a percentage of sales and then gave it away as part of an illegal bundling.
“Lying to improve and soften Microsoft image might assuage some consciences among some of those involved in perpetration of those kinds of activities, but it won’t alter what happened and would be revisionism at best to present those lies as truth. At this point what’s done is done and with all the original sources dead, dying, or going out of print it is of utmost importance to squelch revisionism.
“One area where Microsoft actually was creative was in the way it could keep convincing small companies to negotiate with them under NDA. Microsoft would talk them into meeting, raid them for their ideas and trade secrets, and then shamelessly whip up a half-assed copy of whatever product or service the small company had built their business around. Often the Microsoft imitation product or service was given away or provided at an inappropriately low price, the result was that the small company quickly went under and/or sold to Microsoft.
“They still do that though more sneakily and less blatantly as in the day back when they screwed companies like Sendo.
“Another area where Microsoft is actually creative is in the lies they are able to get the public to swallow via their whisper network of consultants, salespeople, and associated minions. The best example was them going against Novell’s flagship product Netware. Microsoft’s whisper campaign convinced managers that Novell was pulling the plug on its highly profitable, highly popular SME product Netware. Microsoft replacement file server and identity management software was more than a decade away from becoming even partially usable and appeared to be in the proof-of-concept stage. Yet it spread through SME server rooms like a digital hantavirus.” █
It’s not a secret that Microsoft’s future depends on Azure not only being successful, but dominant. With Google Workspace dethroning Office 365 in the cloud productivity markets, Windows needing a complete re-write since a decade ago and their consequent monopoly on exploits and ransomware attacks in the PC and Server markets, much is riding on Azure’s ability to dominate the cloud infrastructure space as Microsoft has done with the OS, productivity, and server spaces before.
One consequence of Microsoft’s dependence on Azure is that Microsoft can post its best quarter ever and investors will get spooked if Azure’s revenue growth slips in the slightest. It also doesn’t help when their CFO Amy Hood admitted that Azure slowing revenue growth still performed better than she anticipated.
“Forty-five percent was both better than we expected and driven by consumption growth, which is very good,” Hood said in an interview. “Demand is healthy. The overall execution was better than I expected.” -Amy Hood
Unlike before though, Microsoft isn’t starting at the top as it did in the OS, Productivity, and Server spaces. Instead, Microsoft was 2 years late to the market and has to compete with the likes of AWS instead and claw market-share away from them. And this is bad news for Microsoft as competing with other tech monopolies in established markets is not something that they’re especially good at; they aren’t the same company that mothballed IBM all those years ago.
The success of Microsoft’s business model relies mostly on them being among the first movers of infant markets, becoming the industry standard, and entrenching its products throughout said industry; lock-in if you will. In turn, their products no longer need to compete on quality, cease to evolve, and stagnate no differently than the human race as they have no ecological competition. Apparently, the law of natural selection even applies to markets.
In doing this, Microsoft’s frustrating, insecure, and unstable architecture renders users change and technology averse, traumatized if you will, and consequently vying to keep everything the same. Further, they can artificially inflate the switching costs of moving to their competition, derail migration efforts to their competition even if it’s better technology, and maintain dominance. Put simply, Microsoft’s products and services create a moat of sorts that keeps users in and competition out while allowing them to compete with themselves. Mitigating their defenses is much easier said than done.
Being a first-mover that optimizes their solutions for lock-in is a double whammy for Microsoft and no one seems to care; hence why they do it. This happens to be why Windows, Active Directory, Server, and Exchange are still in play today despite being legacy, expensive, complex, frustrating, and unstable for users and admins alike. It’s simply too ingrained and users/admins are rendered apathetic to change.
While Microsoft can’t exactly take credit for this brilliant aspect of their business model, they can absolutely laugh all the way to the bank at anyone who is criticizing them about their quality woes without realizing that they don’t even have to compete on quality; at least until Azure became their last hope.
One immediate problem with their tactics though is that they don’t bode well in markets that are already well-established nor is it easy to re-structure a company to engineer for quality when it’s structured to maximize lock-in. Although absolute genius goes into engineering products for lock-in, especially when realizing that all of their engineers are trying to do their best/ethical job, this heroin-esque approach to engineering is systemic and cannot be turned off like a light switch; quite the contrary. Any manager at Microsoft can and will affirm that Microsoft is a big ship to steer and such a restructuring could take years to fully implement.
As such and much like their founder Bill Gates, Microsoft isn’t equipped for fair competition, hence why they lose their ass in markets they’re late to, nor are they known for being a good sport at that. And as they have shown repeatedly with cloud, mobile, social, gaming, and laptop markets, Microsoft is consistently a fish out of water when entering well-established markets because they are not optimized to compete on quality which is the only card that a new entrant has to play against the status quo; exhibit Zoom and Slack. All of which stacks the deck further against Microsoft’s ambitions with Azure.
To highlight this and although Microsoft is doing great things in the cloud space with Office 365, they were late to the market, ironically among the last to host their own services, and are in second place while losing further ground to Google Workspace. The same is true of Azure in that it was 2 years behind AWS to the cloud infrastructure market.
And although Microsoft and analysts claim Azure to be second in the cloud infrastructure space from a revenue perspective, Microsoft has yet to corroborate this with data and is refusing to post individual performance metrics of Azure after a decade of production. Based on what little we’ve seen though, AWS revenue is growing while Azure revenue growth is shrinking which is the opposite of what Azure needs to do. Meanwhile, AWS revenue grew 9% in the last year.
No matter where you look, you can find Microsoft consistently omitting all key performance indicators (KPIs) worthy of mention concerning Azure financials or usage; MAU, P&L, CPA, ARPA, RPE, etc; nada. Meanwhile, you’ll find a whole host of ambiguous metrics such as vague growth rates, total user counts instead of monthly use statistics, and containers like the Intelligent Cloud averaging various offerings together. All of which takes significantly more effort than simply reporting individual performance and is frankly hard to keep under wraps for 12 years. Meanwhile, AWS has no problem reporting on AWS’s performance; they have nothing to hide.
Oddly enough though and while it’s even their policy to never report on KPIs, they definitely track them and occasionally post them but only if they exude a dominant market presence. In doing this though, Microsoft has a tell so to speak. Put simply, when products are doing fantastically, Microsoft will break protocol from time to time and report KPIs. But when products are doing horribly, Microsoft seems to hide behind their bogus policy so as to keep KPIs under lock and key while sugar-coating poor performance with ambiguities instead.
In doing this though, this being not reporting common usage and financial metrics while further hiding individual performance in the Intelligent Cloud, Microsoft has made it impossible for analysts to evaluate where Microsoft stands in the fold compared to AWS or Google Cloud. Ironically, the assessments declaring Azure to be in second place among cloud providers are speculative at best.
“Muddy waters make it easy to catch fish.” — Chinese Proverb
With all of this in mind, it’s easy to see why Microsoft needs investors to believe that Azure’s position is strong and why Microsoft is working so hard to keep Azure’s performance under wraps; that dog don’t hunt. Although I can only speculate, it seems as if the KPIs surrounding Azure do not exhibit dominance or a route to dominance that Microsoft needs to project in order for share prices to keep rising while its stagnant revenue growth serves as further evidence of this.
If said KPIs did exhibit Azure’s dominance or even a route to dominance, then Microsoft would have no reason to be shy and release them in the face of increasing scrutiny of their persistent refusal to report on these metrics. And their refusal to post these metrics while muddying the waters with pointless statistics/rates and odd financial containers instead isn’t exactly a good omen so far as the health of Azure is concerned; if not symptomatic of the contrary. Put simply, if Azure truly had a big ol’ dong then Microsoft would have thrown it on the table by now rather than hiding it behind excuses and obscure metrics for over a decade.
To be fair though, Microsoft could indeed be shy about Azure’s performance for the past 12 years. Azure could be doing great for all I know. What I do know is that omission is the most common form of lying with statistics, followed by obfuscating matters with bogus metrics, and Microsoft doesn’t have an incentive to resort to these squid and ink tactics if Azure is in great shape. All stars go through an inflationary phase before they go supernova.
You’re welcome to believe otherwise though. You’re welcome to believe that the 71.355 billion Microsoft spent on stock buybacks since March of 2018 were made to benefit the shareholders too; but that’s for another day. █
In the previous post (“The Free Software Community Needs Solidarity and Stronger Resistance Against Corporate Oligopolies With Their Overlapping Interests”), which is discussed in the video above, we show the extent/lengths to which this sort of spin can go; they have money and they dominate the media (using the media’s thirst for cash), so they get to control some ‘coin-operated’ liars in ‘journalist’ clothing. They shame grassroots communities while hailing racist corporations. When they’re confronted over their lies they proceed to claim to have been “trolled” by some “rude” people. Who provoked who? 
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