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The Full Story About Finland Might Reveal an 'Inside Job'

Some months ago we spotted and documented a long series of strategic 'donations' which Microsoft made in countries on the verge of adopting GNU/Linux. One of the first countries in this series was Finland. Some more details now emerge from the Finnish press [thanks to a reader for the pointer]. The highlight below is ours.

Prime Minister's former aide arranged Microsoft donation to Finnish schools



Mikko Alkio, the new State Secretary at the Ministry of Employment and the Economy, who had previously served as aide to Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (Centre), was a key instigator of a donation from Microsoft of computer software to Finnish schools.

Alkio was still working as manager for information society relations at Microsoft a couple of weeks ago when Prime Minister Vanhanen visited the United States.

During his US visit, Vanhanen met with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who promised Finnish schools a free package of the Windows Live@edu service platform.


As far as Finland and OOXML go, where does one even start? We recently put together some links and looked well beyond just OOXML.

“Employees that come from Microsoft sometimes pay a favour to their former employer.”Microsoft employees must always be considered, if not carefully tracked as they hop from one company onto another. Novell, Yahoo, XenSource, Nokia, Vodafone, the BBC and many others ought to have taught us some lessons. Employees that come from Microsoft sometimes pay a favour to their former employer. It would not be far-fetched to assume that Microsoft lets some employees go for strategic reasons too, in order to have an effect in governments and rival companies. The latter is less probably, but that's just how the story goes.

We probably will require thus article in the future, its use being an example of possible 'inside jobs' at a national level.

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