08.07.08
Help Needed: Missing History About the “Borland Brain Suck” (Updated)
What can you remember? And what can the Web retain?
e wish to have a permanent penning so that the likes of NBC and the Gates/Microsoft-owned press are unable to hide an embarrassing past… Well, essentially ensuring that the Microsoft-funded media are unable to rewrite history or purge parts of it through neglect or selective glorification [1, 2, 3, 4]. We have witness lots of this pattern recently.
There used to be an article tiled “Borland fights big brain suck” (by Doug Barney in Network World, May 12, 1997). It seems to have disappeared from Google. A reader wrote to us asking: “Any suggestions about finding this article in particular or, more importantly, the general evaporation of articles that don’t toe Bill’s party line?”
The article is mentioned here and maybe the Internet Archive will contain a copy too. Is there any other similar article covering the incident? It’s one among many, but it’s very relevant to us. █
Update: Reader ‘ZiggyFish’ has just found the article and mentioned this in the IRC channel.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
Ziggyfish said,
August 7, 2008 at 4:20 pm
here it is - http://www.networkworld.com/news/1997/0512borland.html