Bonum Certa Men Certa

What Microsoft's Attack on GNU/Linux at HP Teaches Us

"Shouldn't we leave the [Microsoft] elephant alone and stop poking it with sticks? Well, the problem is they aren't going to leave us alone."

--Jeremy Allison, LCA 2010



Ballmer on patents



Summary: Further analysis of the revelation that Microsoft does not permit any competition to even exist

TWO days ago we mentioned very briefly a Comes vs Microsoft exhibit that exposes Microsoft's attack on GNU/Linux at HP. "Let the Market Decide…" is a witty headline from Pogson, who uses this exhibit to demonstrate that Microsoft does not compete, it simply attacks the right of its competition to exist.



Again, I claim that if their product were superior, M$ would not have to pay people to push it. GNU/Linux was doing very well back then, 3% of HPs PCs, but a campaign by M$ to block production held it back. HP was enjoying 100% per annum growth in the GNU/Linux shipments. Isn’t that acceptance by the market? Isn’t that what the customer wants? So, here we are six years later and these trolls still claim GNU/Linux is on only 1% of PCs. Liars.


They are of course lying. But it's the fault of the mainstream press for repeating this, as though it's an echo chamber of lies. More on the above includes:

HP knows about thin clients? They are the leading supplier. They know you can run them very nicely with GNU/Linux, yet they recommend that other OS. Does GM recommend Cadillacs? No. They make them for people who want an expensive car. It is silly to recommend the most expensive line for every customer. There may be some customers of HP for whom “7″ on new machines is the best choice but they must be in the minority or “7″ would be doing a lot more to pump up the PC industry. Instead “7″ is holding the PC industry back my putting a pricey roadblock on renewed IT.

This is the continuing soap-opera that is M$’s marketing schemes. They persuaded HP to put a damper on sales of GNU/Linux in 2002/2003 for a few shekels.


Microsoft also attack GNU/Linux at Dell. The money quote is "we should whack [Dell over GNU/Linux dealings], we should make sure they understand our value”. Microsoft is not a company that competes. It's more like a gang of executives who bribe and "whack" companies that 'dare' to stock the competition. The official term for this is "racketeering", which Microsoft also engages in using software patents (see references at the bottom).

"Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won’t say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: “It’s an unsafe neighbourhood, why don’t you pay me 20 bucks and I’ll make sure you’re okay,” that’s illegal. It’s racketeering."

--Mark Shuttleworth



Related posts:



Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 28/09/2023: Preparing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 and 9.3 Beta
Links for the day
We Need to Liberate the Client Side and Userspace Too
Lots of work remains to be done
Recent IRC Logs (Since Site Upgrade)
better late than never
Techrights Videos Will be Back Soon
We want do publish video without any of the underlying complexity and this means changing some code
Microsoft is Faking Its Financial Performance, Buying Companies Helps Perpetuate the Big Lies (or Pass the Debt Around)
Our guess is that Microsoft will keep pretending to be huge, even as the market share of Windows (and other things) continues to decrease
Techrights Will Tell the Story (Until Next Year!) of How Since 2022 It Has Been Under a Coordinated Attack by a Horde of Vandals and Nutcases
People like these belong in handcuffs and behind bars (sometimes they are) and our readers still deserve to know the full story. It's a cautionary tale for other groups and sites
Why It Became Essential to Split GNU/Linux Stories from the Rest
These sites aren't babies anymore. In terms of age, they're already adults.
Losses and Gains in an Age of Oligarchy - A Techrights Perspective
If you don't even try to fix something, there's not even a chance it'll get fixed
Google (and the Likes Of It) Will Cause Catastrophic Information Loss Rather Than Organise the World's Information
Informational and cultural losses due to technological plunder
Links 28/09/2023: GNOME 45 Release Party, 'Smart' Homes Orphaned
Links for the day
Security Leftovers
Xen, breaches, and more
GNOME Console Won’t Support Color Palettes or Profiles; Will Support Esperanto
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Let's Hope GNU Makes it to 100
Can GNU still be in active use in 2083? Maybe.
GNU is 40, Linux is Just 32
Today it's exactly 40 years since Richard Stallman sent a message regarding GNU
GNU/Linux and Free Software News Mostly in Tux Machines Now
We've split the coverage
Links 27/09/2023: GNOME Raves and Firefox 118
Links for the day
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch
Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards
This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family
Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware
They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up)
There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software
Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware
There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site
This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation)
Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism
There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back
We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links
There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging
We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world