Microsoft Uses the Mindset of Drug Dealers and Pays 'News' Sites to Sell 'Drugs'
As we've just noted, poor countries move away from Windows very rapidly and last month we began "Preserving Deleted Articles About Bill Gates Talking Like a Drug Dealer About Computer Users". (Sites that covered it deleted their pages and the 'king' was already rewriting history; he's clearly bribing a lot of publishers to play along and spread his lies; even Slashdot did that a week ago)
An associate of ours recently took note of this "boingboing" SPAM (boingboing is so bad that Cory Doctorow quit participating in it):
Microsoft "is really desperate to control the files themselves, not just the format," the associate said of the above. Microsoft "spam like that is *everywhere*," the associate added. Thankfully we've already documented and comment on many similar examples.
The associate helped gather a portfolio of Microsoft spam like this "and they are spreading the "PC or Mac" falsehood," the associate added. "Macintoshes *are* PCs..."
"Likewise spam like this:"
"It's important to not draw attention to the specifics while at the same time alerting to the campaign and, most important of all, drawing attention to the technologies which Microsoft is copying and trying to compete against."
To be clear, what they promote above is proprietary spyware (spying on developers by Microsoft).
"The technologies which Microsoft is aping include the IDEs mentioned before (enumerated) and the productivity suits Calligra and LibreOffice. Also the universal office file format, OpenDocument Format, is relevant."
Here's what to use instead:
- Emacs
- Geany
- Thonny
- Eclipse
- GNAT
- SASM
- Fresh
- Gambas
- Geany
- CodeLite
- KDevelop
- NetBeans
- Qt Creator
- OpenCobolIDE
- BlueJ
- Lazarus
- RStudio
Microsoft pays publishers to spread the illusion that the only viable option for developers and non-developers is "drugs" like Visual Studio and Microsoft Office, respectively. Even if LibreOffice has just celebrated 400 million downloads, which is quite a lot and fits the bill/needs of most users.
A lot of the Microsoft spam gets published for a fee by IDG (China). Here's one new example: (there are loads more every day, they stuff or stack search results)
It is a "false choice," the associate said. "LibreOffice, Calligra, and Apple's own tools omitted/dismissed..."
Sadly, Microsoft nowadays bribes universities (academia) to do the same that it pays the media to do. That means that many young people become "addicts", unaccustomed to anything but proprietary spyware.
The associate cited "three key ages your brain declines dramatically", insisting that "it does [...] bring up a very important point which affects IT severely. The leaders of Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD are all entering or have crossed that age of big decline*. Linux and to a certain extent FreeBSD have had limited success in bringing in new blood. However, there are precious few capable of the work and fewer of those with the potential are able to get an actual education. It's *harder* to get into a position to learn ICT these days than 30 years ago due to Microsoft and Bill's long term attack against CS." (And the media)
"[...] (degrees without imparted knowledge or education)" (Andy covered that many times in his blog after decades of teaching in higher education).
There's addiction, affliction, and moles. "Even Linux is overwhelmed by Microsofters," the associate said, "with the encouragement of GKH, to infiltrate and undermine the code base with their cruft."
Andy recently said that "Social control media lowered everyone's IQ significantly. Even the cream of pioneering software and semiconductor design in Britain got bought-up. Our technical 'elite' became the poor and unemployed, laid-off by 2023. We got a slightly less unpleasant deal than Stalin gave the Bourgeois Engineers in the USSR. The usurpers believe they have built their 1000-year Reich and no longer need us. [...] Naturally, a new kind of identity emerged and once again made us marginal and unpopular. After 2001, technically literate people who felt increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of digital began to diverge. We said people were "doing the Internet wrong". Some of us refused smartphones and social media, driven as much by an instinct as anything. We weren't wrong. Again society is catching up." World Without Choices or The Anxious Generation seem like a good fit here. As Andy put it: "Must we stand helplessly-by as leaders very deliberately put ever-more unreliable and untrustworthy tech right at the heart of modern existence? [...] This is a "Dr. Strangelove" moment. We've allowed very important technology that the world depends on to fall into the hands of unfit guardians, pretenders, perhaps traitors to tech who are unable to handle the responsibility."
At the end we might let people without even a college degree (e.g. Zuckerberg or Gates) lead everything, leaving people in their early twenties and teens dependent on hostile systems. The Wikipedia article is good, noted an associate, "but there is a general lie spread that the kids are somehow digital natives implying that flicking thumbs at a small screen magically imparts proficiency in C, Python, Julia, or any other useful skill."
Among developers they try to breed this false mindset that Windows is fine, security issues are "normal", and spying (telemetry) in IDEs is to be tolerated. They also lead them towards GPL violations and encourage secret code, or else code that's given away to Microsoft (served on a silver platter in proprietary GitHub) for Microsoft to hoard without giving anything back. We'll cover this in another (separate) article. █
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* "AsiaBSDCon 2025 just got cancelled, they are going to try to focus on a 2026 reboot," says the associate, "but the site looks abandoned for now."