Yahoo! Blog from Sunnyvale, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Generic license (caption added by us, with Ballmer's words

Summary: Brainwash receives a much greater emphasis at Microsoft, a CMO role is created, and Microsoft finds new ways of deceiving the masses

"I hope Ubuntu is getting lots of money for pissing off users with irrelevant search results from Bong [sic]," says our reader Ryan regarding the Yahoo-Canonical deal [1, 2, 3, 4]. "You can tell Yahoo is Bing now, the least relevant crap ends up on top."

The news is pretty much official that Microsoft has hijacked Yahoo!, sucking the life out of Yahoo! for its own selfish good (and regulators are unable to stop this). To an extent, Microsoft is doing something similar in Amazon, namely gradual assimilation through strategic staff appointments. They don't adhere to the basics of human resources (HR) or maybe they just simply don't care.

Anyway, Jerry Yang has just dumped Yahoo! shares. That's the company he once created, before he labeled Microsoft an "agitator" and saw the company destorying his "baby".

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) holders probably never want to hear the name Jerry Yang again. Well, those same holders will love this… Tonight after the close a filing at the SEC from Yahoo! showed that Jerry Yang is going to be selling stock in the company. David Filo, the other Yahoo founder, is also selling shares. Normally insider selling or founders selling is viewed with some caution. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, and for good reason.

Microsoft's buddy, Carl Icahn, has also dumped his shares, as we noted a few days ago (more press coverage in [1, 2, 3]). Yahoo director Ron Burkle is quiting as well, which only shows what type of damage Microsoft did the company. Also see:

i. Yahoo! Director Burkle Stepping Down

Yahoo!(YHOO Quote) director Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate, won't seek re-election to the Internet search company's board at the annual meeting later this year.

ii. Ron Burkle to Quit Yahoo! Board

Ron Burkle will not seek re-election to Yahoo!'s Board of Directors at the annual shareholders' meeting this year. Burkle gave the usual reasons about other business pursuits and spending more time with his family.

"Now Microsoft, Yahoo Can Tag-Team Google," IDG says mercilessly and it also quotes the same Microsoft-corrupted DOJ [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] which blocked the Yahoo!-Google deal after intense AstroTurfing from Microsoft (political fights by secretive groups of paid-for protesters who fought for Microsoft and later got exposed). Here is the nonsense that IDG is quoting:

Bing will become a better search engine when Microsoft takes over Yahoo search, and better able to compete with search giant Google, the U.S. Department of Justice said in its decision supporting the deal.

Microsoft suffers over $2,000,000,000 in losses per year in this area. Microsoft has only itself to blame because what it shamelessly calls a "decision engine" is simply a tool for lying to the public. No wonder people don't take it seriously. Microsoft is [p]rearranging the results such that they mock Microsoft's competitors and hide Microsoft's crimes. That alone is a reason to boycott Bing, as some journalists have already suggested. But Microsoft has found ways of forcing people to use its "decision engine", namely paying carriers to remove Google as an option and probably repeating browser crimes in IE8. Microsoft also uses the Olympics again, not only to promote Silver Lie but also to make people use its "decision engine" and be indoctrinated the One Microsoft Way.

“Microsoft is [p]rearranging the results such that they mock Microsoft's competitors and hide Microsoft's crimes.”As usual, Microsoft will later lie about market share, citing US-only data so as to triple its real market share at least in the perceived sense. Microsoft is also using this type of deception to fraudulently enhance perception of Windows Mobile and to belittle GNU/Linux. If they are lying often enough for people to actually believe that Microsoft exceeded 10% market share in search (rather than maintained about 3%), then Microsoft believes that people are more likely to fulfill the bogus prophecy by giving Bing a try. In the same way, Microsoft discourages the industry from supporting Linux, based on some fake numbers that produce illusions.

"Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, "he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2." Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition's technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on those companies and individuals that show a genetic weakness for competitors' technologies, to make the industry increasingly resistant to such unhealthy strains, over time."

--Microsoft, internal document [PDF]

Microsoft has begun focusing on perception, not products. According to the news, Microsoft has just hired more marketing (i.e. deception) people from the outside [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft hires from the outside because this way it is not held accountable for overzealous behaviour (like phone-spamming that we mentioned over the weekend). Microsoft has also just created a new role, a CMO (chief marketing officer). That's the equivalent or ministers who are responsible for lying and spinning in order for the public to think wrongly of everything and adhere to blind consent.

As part of a broader realignment of its Central Marketing Group, Microsoft on Thursday named Gayle Troberman to the newly created position of chief marketing officer.

Novell's chief marketing officer is John Dragoon. Here is more information about Gayle Troberman:

ADOTAS – Microsoft has done some rearranging of its central marketing group and created the position of chief creative officer for Gayle Troberman, a 13-year veteran of the company who was most recently general manager for Microsoft advertising and consumer

Working for an abusive monopoly and lying on its behalf is nothing to be proud of. Steve Ballmer is about to give a keynote talk at a "Search Marketing Conference". Will he explain to the public how he manipulated search results so as to mock everything he dislikes? That's just Stalinist.

Two weeks ago we wrote about Microsoft's relationship with Facebook, which is becoming one of the most visited sites on the Web. Facebook will no longer allow Microsoft to spy on Facebook users for marketing reasons [1, 2], but it does embed Microsoft's shameless "decision engine" in the site. According to another report, Microsoft also wants to buy a Facebook game developer and it tried to buy Yelp:

About two months ago, when Yelp turned down an offer from Google, there had been speculation that Yelp had received a counter offer from Microsoft.

That would allow Microsoft to rank competitors just as it demotes and mocks competitors in its so-called 'search engine'. It's a good thing that Yelp turned down the $700+ million Microsoft offer:

When Google offered $550 million to purchase Yelp, Yelp walked away saying it had another offer.

Looks like the other offer was Microsoft. According to Peter Burrows at BusinessWeek, Yelp had "a bid north of $700 million from Microsoft."

If Microsoft is allowed to rank other businesses and products, then it will abuse this power. That's exactly what it's doing with Bing. Microsoft is a morally corrupt company, based on simple evidence.

Regarding the Facebook game developer, there are several more reports about it:

Microsoft Corp. is among companies in talks to buy CrowdStar, the creator of games for social- networking site Facebook, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft is still trying to control top sites and use them in all sorts of ways, especially spying for marketing reasons. There needn't be a tacit admission of this.

Here is Microsoft doing some new sniffing for marketing reasons:

v"Microsoft, Starcom Initiate Research On Mothers

[...]

Commenting on the initiative, Pushkar Sane, chief digital officer, North and South Asia, Starcom MediaVest Group said, “This is one of the many joint initiatives with Microsoft Advertising. Our strategic partnership spans across research, education, measurement and innovation. Mothers are an important audience segment for many of our clients. This initiative will help us bridge the current information gap that exists in our understanding of this key demographic.”

For those who don't know what Starcom is:

Welcome to Starcom. We are a media communications agency that specializes in making connections between consumers and brands.

Yes, more of that very same advertising/spying business.

There is another new liaison of a similar kind -- one involving the Intel-Microsoft collusion partnership [1, 2].

Today, FedScoop announced that Intel and Microsoft will be sponsoring an educational campaign focused on the present and future possibilities of cloud computing called, "Minds in the Cloud." Each week, for 25 weeks, new High Definition (HD) interviews of influential technologists from the government, non-profit, and private sectors discussing their views on the importance of the cloud will be posted to mindsinthecloud.org.

That's more marketing and Intel is once again helping Microsoft. It will of course be geared towards selling Microsoft software and Intel gear. It's not about the so-called 'cloud', but that's the banner under which their campaign is disguised. They sort of hijack 'cloud' for their own purposes, just as they do with "business intelligence" in the following new case:

Microsoft, Solver and ProfitBase are to host a business intelligence (BI) event in Los Angeles on 23 February, which will look at how companies can leverage their existing investments in Microsoft technologies.

It's not a "business intelligence event", it's a business intelligence with Microsoft software event. It's a familiar strategy of hijacking movements like the green causes in order to promote heavy fuels (reversal of causes). That's another subject that's to do with ethical offences in PR/AstroTurfing where smoking or carbon, for example, are described as beneficial in a way that overlaps the reasons against them, which leads to confusion. Microsoft uses these tricks to make people confused about OpenOffice.org (Office Open XML, anyone?) and "open source". ⬆