Summary: Customers who buy new PCs choose Web browsers other than Internet Explorer, so a similar approach should be taken and applied to operating systems
Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9) already has some problems in it [1, 2, 3, 4], not just the security problems which led to attacks against many businesses [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. IE 9 will exclude Windows XP and according to another report, Opera is seeing “85% more downloads in UK” now that customers who are forced to put up with Windows on a new PC are given some choice (however biased it is [1, 2, 3, 4]). Our reader Tim writes:
It’s been reported that Opera has experienced a doubling of downloads since the Windows Ballot was introduced. I have argued that the ballot will make no difference to the average user who has never tried anything other than IE. I challenged at the time that the EU anti-trust case would have been better served looking at OEM rather than the browser issue which people seem to be able to make their own decisions about once they have done their own research.
[...]
[U]sers finally seeing Microsoft and its associated wares in their true light. With so many happy users enjoying alternate products on so many different platform, does Microsoft look cutting edge or does it look tired and old, struggling to keep up with better technologies and happy users of those products?
Is it not the next logical step? People would get an O/S ballot on any new PC. GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora are free (gratis). Dual-booting as standard is another option; it’s not just about restoration of competition, it’s about punishing Microsoft for crimes with which it got a monopoly on the desktop in the first place (fines are not suitable remedies as they do nothing to cure the problem or undo the crimes). █
“We should whack them [Dell over GNU/Linux dealings], we should make sure they understand our value.”
FEW days ago we wrote about Microsoft people engaging with and entering "Open Source", possibly in order to change its agenda (although it could innocently be just a side effect). This is known as entryism and if there is no shielding against it, then the outcome can be fatal. One has to be careful of the sort of 'monopoly' on Free/open source licence statistics from a Microsoft-sourced company called Black Duck for instance. (Dis)Information is power and this power tends to be misused when put in the wrong hands. Deception and advertising is how those entities make a living. Likewise, to let former Microsoft employees decide whose voice counts in “Open Source” is rather risky. Last year we showed that Microsoft lobbyists (notably Zuck from Association for Competitive Technology) managed to infiltrate an “Open Source” panel where they subverted collective opinion to affect policies. We took it up to the European Commission and wrote about this in:
Nevertheless, why would such a site promote Microsoft’s agenda? It’s a Windows site and strangely enough, it is registered by The Economist:
Registrars.Registrant:
The Economist Newspaper Limited
25 St James's Street
London, SW1A 1HG
GB
Domain name: EUROPEANVOICE.COM
Administrative Contact:
Manager, Domain economistdomains@comlaude.com
25 St James's Street
London, SW1A 1HG
GB
+44.2078360070 Fax: +44.8700118187
Technical Contact:
Administrator, DNS dnsadmin@economist.com
26 Red Lion Square
London, WC1R 4HQ
GB
+44.2078360070 Fax: +44.8700118187
Registration Service Provider:
Nom IQ Ltd (trading as Com Laude), admin@comlaude.com
44-20-78360070
Address for Legal Service: Nom IQ Ltd (trading as Com Laude), 116 Long
Acre, London, WC2E 9SU. Com Laude is responsible for the registration,
maintenance and management of this domain name.
Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 12-Jan-2010.
Record expires on 21-Jul-2012.
Record created on 21-Jul-1999.
Registrar Domain Name Help Center:
http://tucowsdomains.com/help/
Domain servers in listed order:
NSGBR.COMLAUDE.CO.UK
NSUSA.COMLAUDE.NET
NSSUI.COMLAUDE.CH
Domain status: clientTransferProhibited
clientUpdateProhibited
The event it is organising is supported by ACT (the Microsoft front group). The president of the FFII, Benjamin Henrion, publicly warns that “ACT continues to push for software patents in Europe, Innovation Summit at the end of the month in Brussels.” ACT is clearly a front for Microsoft and rather than deny this with counter arguments, Zuck and his colleagues repeatedly defame my character in their Web site. This attitude is telling and it is also used by Microsoft technical evangelists (sometimes a euphemism for AstroTurfers on the payroll). Defamation is what one gets for exposing Microsoft’s nature and modus operandi. Groklaw received similar treatment from SCO.
“ACT continues to push for software patents in Europe…” –Benjamin Henrion, FFIINot only ACT supports this event though. Microsoft’s “eskills” project is there too. Here is some background (more in another page with proof that it’s a Microsoft project in this document/leaflet[PDF]), which ties the project to “Jan Muehlfeit, chairman of Microsoft Europe and co-chair of the European”. We wrote about him in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] because of his lobbying in Europe. He is allegedly a former communist [1, 2], but that’s not the key point.
It is abundantly clear that Microsoft is actively working towards the goal of legalising software patents in Europe so that it can pursue Free software exclusion (taxing it or making it illegal).
The president of the FFII points to this new post and argues that “Neelie Kroes pushing for software patents in standards, Digital Commissioner Kroes proposes new EU policy of open standards” (she was lobbied by Microsoft).
From the introduction:
AN IMPORTANT POLICY PAPER, A Digital Agenda for Europe – A policy for smart growth and innovation in a digital society, HAS BEEN LEAKED OF WHICH AN EXCERPT IS BELOW. DIGITAL AGENDA COMMISSIONER KROES HAS PROPOSED A SERIOUS MOVE OF THE EU TOWARD OPEN STANDARDS AND INTEROPERABILITY. THESE PROPOSALS ARE ALREADY BEING ATTACKED BY HER COLLEAGUES IN THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION WHO REPRESENT ENTERPRISE, COMMERCE AND INTERNAL MARKET. NEVERTHELESS, THESE PROPOSALS DESERVE CONSUMER AND CITIZEN SUPPORT.
Neelie Kroes has been making many mistakes regarding software patents as of late [1, 2]. We also learn that “DG Enterprise is pro software patents, and hostile to real open standards. They defend patent holders such as Philips and BSA.” In the following new post we are reminded that in the UK at least, software patents are already forcing their way into the system.
In simplified terms the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) on the other hand follows law and practice in the UK instead where a patent for software can be granted only where the software has a technical effect.
In summary, Microsoft has not given up on changing EU laws to discriminate against Free software. This is a major issue that a lot of GNU/Linux-oriented Web sites continue to ignore. Sometimes, those who point this out are accused of sensationalism or FUD; such accusations are only proof of gullibility and they are counter productive. █
Summary: Europe’s policy on software patents and the ACTA factor; the MPEG patent pool turns out to be not much of a sleeping giant but an awake one; patents relating to cancer genes continue to needlessly cost lives
Microsoft keeps struggling to change Europe’s patent law and enable taxation of Free software. The FFII’s president, Benjamin Henrion, has tracked some of the latest developments in that regard; they happen to include ACTA.
“Just heard one guy on RTBF Purefm from an anti-piracy org in Belgium that they were pushing for “technical measures” on the ISPs (filtering),” said Henrion, who added that the “European Parliament ITRE committee [is] promoting interoperability and technological neutrality”; he skeptically points to this document[PDF] from the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy. ACTA booster Paul Rübig [1, 2] is the reporter and here is the text which alludes to patents (inside “interoperability”):
SUGGESTIONS
The Committee on Industry, Research and Energy calls on the Committee on Legal Affairs, as the committee responsible, to incorporate the following suggestions in its motion for a resolution:
Recommends that the Commission should:
1. Promote availability of EU-wide licenses for intellectual property rights (IPR);
2. Consider, as a step towards an internal market for IPR, licenses based on the original language, enabling a licensee for a work in one language to distribute it across the EU in that language;
3. Promote interoperability and technological neutrality, allowing content covered by IPR to be distributed regardless of technology or format used, and allowing convertibility of content between formats;
4. Maintain strong protection of IPR while facilitating legal use of works through easily available, one-stop, EU-wide licensing options, supported by transparency regarding the holders of the IPR;
5. Consider effective sanctions to deter infringement of copyright and prevent the losses caused to rights holders as a result, while upholding the principle that, for example, communications providers are mere conduits and as such not liable for infringement occurring through or facilitated by their services;
6. Make full use of sanctions available to it under competition and trade law where relevant;
7. Include, where relevant, an evaluation of the impact relating to IPR, in particular with respect to small and medium-sized enterprises, in all impact assessments;
8. Contribute, through the European Counterfeiting and Piracy Observatory, to the development of common standard procedures and criteria to enable the production of reliable and comparable data on the occurrence and value of counterfeiting and piracy across sectors.
FFII Greece has this new article describing the patent situation in Europe:
This is a presentation I made at an open source conference in Greece, 13 March 2010, at TEI of Piraeus.
Getting involved with software patents seems boring, and, unfortunately, it is, at least for me. I’m a computer professional and I like writing code. I’m a Python/Django fan, and I’m involved in a couple of free software projects. One of them is a state project (and it’s free because I took the opportunity to move it towards the right direction when I saw that the right people were in the right positions). I don’t like politics and legal issues much. However, I do occasionally mess around with copyrights and patents; not because I like it, but because I like being free, and it is a price I pay to defend my freedom.
[...]
I’m in Greece, I create a new invention, and I patent it at the Greek Industrial Property Organisation. What happens in other countries? Could someone from Italy copy my invention? The answer is they can, because the Greek patent is only valid in Greece. In order to solve this problem, many European countries signed the European Patent Convention (EPC) in 1973. Under the EPC, the European Patent Office (EPO) was born. If you are granted a patent by the EPO, then it is practically valid in all countries that have signed the EPC.
Note that the EPC is not a European Union treaty, but a treaty of the 36 countries that have signed it. The EPO is not an EU institution, but an international institution of the 36 countries that have signed the EPC.
“Since EPO failed to change the law, they then attempted to change the court,” quotes Henrion from the article above. This leads us to discussing the ACTA, which has a European Parliament meeting scheduled for 2 weeks from now (Room ASP 1G2).
Henrion has transcoded the following video, which he says is about “Punishing Patent Pirates with freeze of bank accounts.”
Direct link (“European Parliament about ACTA: Punishing Computer Pirates”)
The original video was in a Microsoft format (more here). Henrion claims that “Microsoft sponsors the European Parliament’s infrastructure, so now 600M EU citizens have to pay.” He also shows this parliamentary questioning where the “European Commission confirms they won’t give the ACTA documents to the public, since other countries oppose [it].”
Lastly, and also via Henrion, this article in German shows “ALDI threatened by MPEGLA in Dusseldorf court, the European version of the Eastern District of Texas.”
In this decent new recording, Novell’s former community manager for OpenSUSE asks: “What’s Bilski got to do with open source?”
Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier speaks with Aaron Williamson, counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
The creator of the World Wide Web says that “software patents are a terrible thing”, but often we forget about the patents that actually kill people. We previously gave examples where treatment of cancer was impeded by patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. This mostly revolves around a very controversial patent that we mentioned before and is now mentioned in Reuters [via].
New Study Points Out That Gene Patent On Trial Is Very, Very Broad
Myriad Genetics’ disputed patent on the BRCA1 breast cancer gene is “surprisingly broad” and could interfere with future research, three experts said on Tuesday.
Basically, Suk’s whole position is based on the fact that the monopoly rents of designers is decreased by a lack of copyright, but she fails to consider that this leads to greater and more frequent innovation (which we see all the time in the market). What’s even stranger is that she flip-flops her argument in the middle of the paper. She talks repeatedly about how designers need big profits to have the incentive to innovate, but then says that big designers aren’t the ones really threatened. Instead, she claims, it’s the smaller designers. But, those designers didn’t have those big profits to protect in the first place. They’re out there trying to make a name for themselves by designing something new and cool — so they have plenty of incentive to innovate. And if their design this year is copied, that’s great for them because it gives them greater recognition and means the demand for their original products will be even greater the following season.
Do we want to live in a world where knitting can become a punishable offense for ‘infringing’ someone’s design? Seriously, when did the patent system lose sight of its original goals? It’s not there to assist big businesses; rather, it’s intended to protect small businesses with from the minority of the opulent. █
Summary: Microsoft accused of blocking GNU/Linux and more leaks about this scandal are high in demand
THREE WEEKS ago we were offered some leaks that expose more corruption (see links at the bottom) behind the Magalhães initiative. No sooner than yesterday we found the following post in USENET:
Subject: Magalhães: Microsoft made pressure to make it not possible to choose another operating system From: Lusotec Date: Wednesday 17 Mar 2010 22:57:50 Groups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
<quote translated from Portuguese>
According to Paulo Trezentos, in the inquire commission to the Foundation for the Mobile Communications
Magalhães: Microsoft made pressure to make it not possible to choose another operating system.
A representative of the company Caixa Mágica (Linux) – software supplier
for the Magalhães – Paulo Trezentos, said yesterday in the inquire commission to the Foundation for the Mobile Communications (FMC) that Microsoft made pressures so that the users of the device could not choose the operating system.
(…)
The Magalhães computer provides ‘dual boot’, meaning, it has installed two operating systems – Windows XP and Linux – and the users can choose in which they want to start the work.
However, a representative of the Caixa Mágica, company responsible for the installation of Linux on the Magalhães computers, said yesterday that Microsoft made pressures to make this choice not possible, so that Windows would start automatically.
“Microsoft used all kinds of pressures so that Windows would start automatically, but both the Ministry of Education and the JP Sá Couto succeed” in making it possible to select the operating system., said Paulo Trezentos, during the audition in the inquire commission to the FMC.
For those that don’t know, Magalhães computers are laptops that where supplied to almost all of the nearly half million Portuguese elementary students, ages 6 to 10. The Magalhães laptops had both Windows XP and Caixa Mágica, a distribution based on Mandriva but adapted to the Portuguese market.
Also to make it clear, this particular news puts focus on Microsoft but the inquire commission main objective is to investigate the spending of public funds by the FMC. Microsoft’s actions are not central to the inquire.
As for the news, it is just Microsoft’s traditional and unethical way of doing business. Fortunately this time it was unsuccessful.
Regards.
Can any of our Portuguese readers obtain/gain access to those sensitive documents that we keep hearing about? As the links below show, Microsoft corruption in Portugal is rather commonplace, but publishing concrete proof would be invaluable. █
Citizens of Quebec have already sued their government for allegedly illegal deals with Microsoft [1, 2]. Going further back, Groklaw translated an article from French (it’s Quebec after all), saying that “the general translation is that you can find at the link the documents regarding a lawsuit a company called Savoir-Faire Linux, Inc. has filed in the Superior Court of Quebec against the government’s pension plan for choosing Microsoft software without putting the job out publicly for bid. It seems the law in Quebec is very strict that the government is supposed to publish an invitation to tender for any acquisition of more than $25,000, and this job was a good deal more than that.
“I gather Savoir-Faire Linux’s position is that only open standards, formats and protocols are suitable to match the demands of a public market policy upholding four fundamental principles: act in an transparent way, favor strong competition, favor local economic development, get the best overall cost.”
“…Savoir-Faire Linux, Inc. has filed in the Superior Court of Quebec against the government’s pension plan for choosing Microsoft software without putting the job out publicly for bid.” –Pamela Jones, GroklawThe headline said: “Savoir-Fair Linux, Inc. sues Quebec government agency over Microsoft”
At the bottom we are appending some more valuable references about the situation in Quebec. It may matter not just because Microsoft is sued in Canada (class-action lawsuit) but also because Glyn Moody reveals more grounds for Canadian antitrust in Quebec:
Does Quebec Hate Free Software?
[...]
What’s particularly disturbing here is that it looks like the regional government doesn’t want anyone to question why it is going with proprietary software, and not giving free software a fair chance – that’s doubly wrong. (Via @akaSassinak.)
Does Microsoft think “Rip-Off Britain” is an instruction?
In the current economic climate what do you think is the best way to keep existing customers happy and encourage them to spend more with you?
Introduce some special offers perhaps? Add extra value to your products and services? Be even more nice than you are normally?
[...]
Just think about that for a moment. That’s 100,000,000 individual downloads of a free product, the alternative legacy application from Microsoft will soon cost you £430. Oh yes, and those 100,000,000 downloads happened in a year and 16 days…
Brits should learn from Quebec and consider a lawsuit. It’s long overdue and the evidence available for presentation is overwhelming. The British Standards Institute (BSI) too was sued two years ago after it had engaged in what seemed like corruption with Microsoft [1, 2]. █
_____
[1] The Long Road To Free Software in Quebec
The report was overwhelming: “ We have no control over our own information systems! And yet that is the one and only area in which we can achieve the necessary gains in productivity.” That day, I came to understand the many needs that are fulfilled by free software and how it is of crucial importance to our country’s economy.
Events this week, mostly at the Université du Québec à Montréal, will promote the benefits of free software and introduce beginners to the open vs. proprietary politics that divide the tech-savvy community.
But the hostility between the two camps is nothing like it was in the past, said Michael Gould, an analyst with Forrester Research. And on the one hand, this is good news for open sourcers.
“A lot of significantly sized companies have been using more open source software,” Gould said. “A lot of the concerns they had, like quality, security and support, have been mostly addressed.”
The IT department for the Canadian province of Quebec is consolidating hundreds of Oracle databases — spread across hundreds of midrange servers — onto a new mainframe running Linux on top of z/VM.
Summary: The European Commission turns its back on open standards that anyone can accept; ACTA and the Digital Economy Bill show a legal land grab by corporations
WE live in interesting times when constitutions are being blatantly violated and overridden. Lobbyists play a role on behalf of companies whose embrace of our laws that defend us is proving rather deadly. This post is not about the imbalanced patent system that mostly protects monopolies; this time it’s about open standards being polluted with software patents, even in Europe. A Red Hat employee presents some details (it is his personal interpretation, not Red Hat’s stance):
For years and years I am using and promoting the term Open Standards. And it has always been very clear what an Open Standard is and, more important, what it is not.
You can go through various defintions of Open Standards:
* Free Software Foundation Europe
* European Interoperability Framework (v1)
* Digistan
* Danish Parliament
* Bruce Perens
And no matter what differences you find in those definitions, they all agree on some crucial points, the most important being the freedom to use and implement the standard without having to ask for permission or having to pay license fees for the use of an Open Standard.
[...]
If you agree this far, pay special attention to this:
Currently, the Chinese companies using technologies detained by European companies are not allowed to enter into negotiations on the amount of royalties due to the latter, when they use their essential patents in the framework of open standards. The situation is highly detrimental to European companies and their complaint has been reflected in the European Chamber of Commerce in China (EUCCC) – IPR Working Group’s Position Paper 2005. The Commission therefore urged the Chinese government to take action in order to ensure that those royalties are duly paid by Chinese companies.
Hartmut Pilch from FFII pointed my attention to this and added some valuable comments here.
Bottom line is – DG Trade, represented by Mr. Luc Pierre Devigne, seems to use the term Open Standards in a way that is simply not compatible with the accepted definition of Open Standards. Royalty payments on Open Standards can simply not exist in my view.
So…
Who have we here? It’s a buddy of ACTA lover Pedro Velasco-Martins. Luc Devigne and other ACTA boosters can be found in conjunction in an old report which we mentioned in this post. At least we manage to identify people who are fundamentally against the people whom they represent and instead promote the agenda of large corporations with intellectual monopolies.
As a reminder, Europe overwhelmingly rejects ACTA, whereas the US loves it [1] and here in the UK we have the complementary Digital Economy Bill trying to sneak its way into law [2, 3, 4, 5]. Our constitutions are being stomped on. █
_____
[1] Europe trashes ACTA as Obama praises it
Earlier this week, we noted that the major parties in the European Parliament had all agreed on a resolution trashing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the secret process that has been hashing it out. That resolution has passed Parliament by a huge margin—633 yes votes, 13 no votes, and 16 abstentions.
The Greens/EFA coalition praised the vote. Greens MEP Carl Schlyter of Sweden said that “ACTA risks becoming known as the Absence of Commission Transparency Agreement… The EU cannot continue to negotiate on ACTA if the people are not allowed to take part in the process. It is also a totally absurd and unacceptable situation if MEPs, behind closed doors, have to ask the Commission about the content of the agreements we are supposed to vote on.”
The Liberal Democrats are preparing to change their controversial amendment to the digital economy bill, which has its third and final reading in the House of Lords on Monday.
The change would give sites blocked under the bill the power to challenge it in the courts, and to demand legal costs and damages from any copyright owner that caused it to be wrongly blocked through court procedings.
But the Open Rights Group, which campaigns on digital rights and freedoms, said that the amendment would not solve deeper problems with the bill – which may be rushed into law with barely any debate in the Commons – and called for it to be abandoned.
Last week I wrote about the great news on the ACTA front, but sadly that’s just one battle we need to win. Another is against the insanely retrogressive Digital Economy Bill – an ironic name if ever there were one, given that it seeks to impose the old rules of the *analogue* economy on the digital world. As such, it is likely to have a huge negative impact on companies using the Internet (that is, anyone in business not still using the abacus.)
[...]
That handily maps out is how we can stop the Bill: by creating that “groundswell of massive opposition”. What I think we need to do is to make it clear to our MPs is how the music recording industry just expects them to roll over and accept the Bill as is, rather than to carry out their parliamentary duties and to examine it and amend where appropriate. We need to get across the fact that this Bill is not incidental, but will determine the economic and social landscape for this country in the next few years; as such, it needs to be drafted carefully, not thrown together at the last minute.
The debate over the Digital Economy Bill in the UK (the attempt to ratchet up copyright law to repay favors to an entertainment industry that is slow to adapt) has taken an odd twist. Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing has the details of a leaked memo from the BPI (pdf) to a bunch of recording industry execs and lobbyists, that details the state of the bill and the ongoing strategy for getting it approved. There are a few items worth noting:
1. The BPI seems to think that the UK intelligence community is now the biggest threat to stopping the bill. Seriously. Apparently, UK spies are afraid that passing this bill will drive a very large number of people to switch to using encrypted internet tools, making it that much more difficult to spy on them.
“Staff at the European Patent Office went on strike accusing the organization of corruption: specifically, stretching the standards for patents in order to make more money.
“One of the ways that the EPO has done this is by issuing software patents in defiance of the treaty that set it up.”
Summary: More brainwash from Microsoft’s front group, the BSA (with former employees of Gates Senior); Europe’s patent office — not Europe itself — may be having problems
COMPARED to the rest of the world, Europe is doing pretty well (financially too) and China, where intellectual monopolies are mostly disregarded, has many countries owing it money. We don’t want to turn this into a discussion about national debts, but the point we are trying to make here is that the BSA, a Microsoft front group with Gates (senior) connections [1, 2] that’s quietly attacking Free software across the world this year [1, 2, 3, 4], is simply delusional. We have already shown that the BSA lobbies to legalise software patents in Europe [1, 2, 3, 4].
“We have already shown that the BSA lobbies to legalise software patents in Europe.”For a software developer, there are many advantages being located in Europe. It protects the developer from a lot of spurious lawsuits and in Europe there are very few patent trolls. Nevertheless, according to the BSA’a policy, “The business environment in Europe characterized by low numbers of IT patents was identified as holding Europe back.” Is that so? The author of Against Monopoly says that we shouldn’t take US patent law seriously“because it takes well over 8 years of litigation and thousands of dollars for an Appeals Court to determine that attaching a piece of memorabilia to a trading card is ‘obvious’ and thus, not patentable.”
Thanks to the president of the FFII for pointing out the BSA’s ridiculous statement. He also found out[PDF] that the “EPO lost money with the bankruptcy of the Icelandic Kaupthing bank? Read page 13 item 414 362.402.825 ISK == 2 Million EUR”
Later he argued that “Since EPLA area is not a constitution-based republic, appeal to national supreme courts and ECJ should be allowed http://i5.be/aB7” █
John Dvorak wrote an article titled “Is Microsoft Behind Google’s Italy Woes?”
Microsoft is up to its old tricks again. Google is under all sorts of attacks right now—all somehow related to Microsoft. There are a slew of stories about how Microsoft managed to get Google into anti-trust trouble with the EU. This proxy fight may also have had something to do with the situation in Italy, in which Google executives were indicted for allowing some dopey video to be uploaded in that country.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has taken the high road as more and more antitrust regulators start to display an interest in Google’s practices. Rather than cheer on the investigations – or instigate new ones – Bartz has stayed mostly neutral on the matter, perhaps even supporting her biggest rival a little.
Yahoo’s position is interesting given what Microsoft did to it and news like this. Following some interview/s, there was the following additional coverage:
Microsoft Nick published an article that says: “If Bartz were Yahoo CEO then, would she have accepted Microsoft buyout? ‘Sure’”
Microsoft is still trying to defend its abuse of Yahoo!, pretending that it was a saviour rather than a bully. It is crucial to remember Bartz’s past ties with Microsoft and how she came to power (proxy battle).
BNET writes: “It’s Official: Yahoo Is Available for Purchase. But Who Wants It?”
Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz put in an appearance on CNBC yesterday during her company’s 15th anniversary. There was the bravado you could expect from any CEO of a publicly-traded company trying to convince listeners why the company is doing better than many may think. However, one interesting tidbit that came out was that any company could buy Yahoo for the “right price”. The question is, of the potential suitors, who would bother with an acquisition?
Microsoft is getting Yahoo! users (including Ubuntu users [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]), so it doesn’t need to buy Yahoo! anymore. Microsoft got what it wanted from Yahoo! very cheaply.
So anyway, Microsoft has not only abused Google but it was abusing Yahoo! too. Microsoft is trying to hurt its competition rather than improve its own product. Microsoft’s entire history is like that.
A world where Microsoft is relevant in search is a rather scary one because Microsoft — being the control freak that it is — changes the search results to suit its own agenda. Here is a new look at what Microsoft does in the Arab world: [via]
Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the ‘Arabian Countries’
[...]
It is unclear, however, whether Bing’s keyword filtering in the Arab countries is an initiative from Microsoft, or whether any or all of the Arab states have asked Microsoft to comply with local censorship practices or laws.
[...]
Microsoft’s declared aim from this type of censorship is to filter out “results that might return adult content.” However, filtering at the keyword level results in overblocking, as banning the use of certain keywords to search for Web sites, not just images, prevents users from accessing—based on Microsoft’s definition of objectionable content—legitimate content such as sex education and encyclopedic information about homosexuality.
Microsoft, unlike Google, never said that it wouldn’t be evil. So when it comes to censorship of its search engine Bing, it should come as no surprise that the company is much more willing than Google to block content rather than risk upsetting censorious governments around the world.
That doesn’t just apply to China, where Google says it plans to stop filtering search results.
Google is changing its position in China, with an announcement to come shortly (according to Google’s CEO). Microsoft Nick has meanwhile assured that it’s business as usual for Microsoft in China where it will maintain operations. Microsoft is generally close to the Chinese government, for diplomatic reasons that we covered here before.
Microsoft’s fear of Google does make sense. Google is no longer a search company (maybe the googol refers to money); it threatens Microsoft’s fattest cash cow and this new acquisition (announced here) is doing more to undo Microsoft lock-in in office suites:
Stepping up its fight against Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. acquired DocVerse, a technology startup that allows people to edit Microsoft Office files online.
Google has stepped up its assault on Microsoft’s productivity software with the acquisition of a start-up company that allows Office users to edit and share their documents on the web.
People ought to avoid both Microsoft and Google when it comes to mail and office suites. both are proprietary.
NetSuite woos Microsoft resellers with commissions
NetSuite Inc (N.N), which makes Web-based business accounting programs, is offering software resellers commissions to promote its products over those of bigger rival Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O).
Microsoft is feeling the heat on the Web, where it is losing over $2 billion per year. █
