09.01.08
Eye on Microsoft: Bigger Clouds and Worse Security
Yahoo Finds Google After Escaping a Villain
For Yahoo and Google, things appear to be working out pretty well despite Microsoft's disruption via lobbying arms and hypocritical accusations.
Google says its web advertising deal with Yahoo is on schedule and will not be derailed by US anti-trust scrutiny.
It is a tad amusing that Microsoft empowered the very same competitors it sought to harm when it first approached Yahoo! It’s poetic justice. Just to reiterate, Microsoft may have used illegal proxies to weaken Yahoo and it also does, for a fact, use AstroTurfers, which it hires via the LawMedia Group (one proxy among others) to shoot down this Yahoo/Google collaboration.
Growing Pains on the Cloud and the Desktop
There are other reasons for Microsoft to fear Google. It’s not just search and advertising, which are key ingredients of profitable cloud computing. Google employs the necessary skill set and assets which enabled it — via an acquisition — to dominate Web video and secure a good position in software as a service (SaaS). It also collaborates with Salesforce now. Here is a new article about this challenge to Microsoft’s already-lost dominance.
Cloud computing about to rain on Microsoft parade
Work from home and get paid to log on to YouTube — that’s life in “the cloud”.
The cloud, or cloud computing, is the latest phrase on the lips of every IT geek, and they say it’s transforming our lives by quantum leaps and bounds.
Microsoft’s appointment of Jerry Seinfeld was mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4]. John Dvorak does not believe that this is going work.
So the question becomes not whether the campaign will stink, but how bad.
I have come up with three possibilities. The kindest one would be “just stinks.” After that comes “stinks to high heaven,” followed by the frightful “What are they thinking!?”
[...]
So we’ll all await these new messages from Microsoft knowing that they will probably not stink to high heaven, but merely just stink.
Hammered by Non-Free Software
An interesting new case sheds some light on the legality of lock-in and its accompanying abuse of power. It could serve as precedence affecting Microsoft et al.
AN IT company is taking on Medicare, suing it for anti-competitive conduct and breaches of the Trade Practices Act.
Thelma Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of technology company ICS Global, has filed a statement of claim in the Federal Court, alleging Medicare has misused taxpayer funds by replicating its computer program and offering it free to those in the private health sector.
ICS Global is also suing Medicare for misusing its market power and for predatory pricing.
The War in Iraq
It’s not what you think. A tradition of back doors and poor engineering at Microsoft is causing Iraqi authorities to
lose control of their computer systems. This must be why armies across the world gradually migrate to GNU/Linux (e.g. Turkey, Germany, US DoD). It’s just common sense
It is his unit’s lone computer, highlighting the country’s vulnerability to a community of Iraqi hackers defacing websites and attempting to hack into sensitive internal networks.
Iraq’s government is engaged in a bloody struggle against al-Qaeda, and its computers make a prime target for global terror networks that have added hacking to their arsenal.
“We could have the most powerful anti-hacking force in the world, but we’d still have no computers, so we couldn’t do anything,” says Ali Hussein, one of 12 computer science graduates added to the cybercrime team last month. “The government thinks about guns, tanks and raiding houses. Hackers just aren’t a priority.”
Regarding this issue of poor security, the other day we wrote about editors who are messing with article headlines. A reader has just sent us this possible new example from the news (”Worm on NASA Space Station Underscores Spread of Online Gaming Threats”).
The reader explains: “Here’s another example of article titles getting fiddled, presumably by MSFTers. Online gaming gets the blame in the title, even though the body clearly points out that this is a Windows vulnerability.
“NASA has no business running Windows on any missions. It was on a notebook computer — for now — but even that’s unacceptable: Space missions are not the place to decide that bad engineering is acceptable. That’s fine for the corporate board rooms, where ideology trumps profit, but the Microsoft effect of apathy toward bad engineering needs to stay out of life-or-death environments. It’s already killing patients, let’s not start to kill healthy astronauts, too.”
Request for Information
This is a kind request of behalf of a reader/researcher.
If any of our readers can find an article from a few years ago (2-5) defining the Microsoft effect, that would be helpful. The author even named the type of cognitive dissonance going on. Basically it’s a form of sour grapes: the Windows people have sucks, so there for all other systems suck just as much.
The article may be from pseudonym “Paul Murphy”, but there’s no certainty that it is the same person or people that now use the pseudonym. █
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.