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.”
Summary: More Microsoft dirty secrets (anti-GNU/Linux evidence), courtesy of Comes; book about Gates Watcher retrieved, for its scoops to be shared more widely
A YEAR and a half ago we wrote about an HP smoking gun or at least a deja vu that can help connect Microsoft and SCO. Groklaw has just found an interesting Comes vs Microsoft exhibit which shows how Microsoft responded to HP’s embrace of Linux. From the introduction:
I have another Comes v. Microsoft exhibit to share with you, Exhibit 9542 [PDF], a November 22, 2002 email to Jim Allchin and Orlando Ayala from Mike Oldham. It has to do with a planned meeting on the 25th between the two companies, on their “Better Together” theme. I think it will explain some things we’ve sometimes wondered about. One thing is clear. Microsoft was seriously concerned about Linux. And HP? Somewhat flexible, I’d say. Note the part about “the HP plan of record” to “bring a new Linux powered device into the mid-range marketplace” regarding NAS devices (network attached storage devices) and how Microsoft was able to convince them not to do that.
Microsoft and HP recently renewed their vows.
From the exhibit we have : “Based on HP’s server shipments, HP reports Windows share is up one point to 73%, Linux is also up one to two points to 12-13%. This represents approx. 200K Linux servers in the next year. HP believes that a substantial part of the Linux growth is due to the declining share for Novell. However they believe there is a growing Linux threat in the enterprise space – especially financial accounts….”
“Microsoft recently used similar tactics against i4i and against OLPC.”That was in 2002. Interesting. We have more Comes material queued for posting, but not enough time to work on it. One exhibit[PDF] (full text here) that was shown to us by a reader is what Groklaw describes as: “Letter from Bill Gates to Robert Carr, GO Corporation, December 4, 1987 (“It is too bad that you never got a chance to make Framework into the mainstream product it deserved to be. In the objects we are building for the object oriented versions of our languages we will have a concept very similar to your frame.”)”
It “looks like useful work,” said our reader, who helped us see a similarity to Mono, .NET, and Java (former Java developers sometimes join Microsoft). “My point is to update the blank files on GR with brief relevant quotes,” said our reader, “And, for instance in relation to GO, to create a narrative from the texts. In this case, billg [Bill Gates] gets a looksee at GO technology, then after sabotaging GO, incorporates it [into] Microsoft product and later on offers the GO CEO a job at Microsoft.”
We have already gathered “GO” + Microsoft references, extracted the relevant quotes, and put them in chronological order, then inserted links to relevant original Comes exhibits. It’s quite blatant. Microsoft recently used similar tactics against i4i and against OLPC.
He wrote: “Near the end there is a voiceover quote referring to the villain (Arthur Case), something like “he sold his integrity for money and spend the rest of his life trying to get it back”. Just then the scene switches to a picture of a billboard, of Microsoft. Get the movie [trailer] and check it out.
“No shot in a movie is by accident, is this an accident or not?”
Another reader has sent us some articles on Microsoft — old articles taken from different Web sites. “I’m sure you already probably know all this information,” he said, but actually, no, there is a lot of material there which we will organise quite soon. “If Boycott Novell website could offer a download it all as archive version that is html based, it can be translated very eas[ily],” this reader added.
This reader also sent us parts of a book from a revealing account of the daughter of Pam Edstrom (of Waggener Edstrom). Steve Ballmer’s wife comes from there and a lot of dirty secrets about the inner culture at Microsoft are being told there. Expect some interesting posts soon. This book is titled “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates”. █
Summary: How Microsoft makes money out of natural disasters; Microsoft takes Perl down with bot shakeups
KATRINA is well behind us, but several Microsoft Web sites used to speak about the dumping of Microsoft software (at zero cost, initially) that got many victimised businesses and local operations ’stuck’ with Microsoft. They became victims twice. When disaster strikes, it is often seen as an opportunity for corporate takeover (there is a lot of budgeted money for reconstruction). In Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine”, she explains how Katrina was exploited by corporations to transform their business success rather than transform the ruined land.
We have discussed this in the IRC channel for the past couple of days [1, 2] because of the Haiti earthquake. Separately, one of our readers mailed us the following last night:
Microsoft is puffing up some kind of disaster capitalism in Haiti. Eweek uncritically announced some $1.2 million of donations and a call to employees for aid. While it is nice of them to encourage others to help, $1.2 million is a piddling amount for such a large company and Eweek might have asked if the “donations” were more of the usual, $1,500 worth of CDs and temporary licensing keys with a MSRP of $1.2 million. It is a shame that details were not provided to reduce well earned cynicism.
Having seen Microsoft in action for Katrina and Rita, I can say that they are a hindrance rather than help. Red Cross offices suffered under Microsoft’s notoriously poor networking, which kept them from being able to act as efficiently as they should. Citizens were forced to use IE to sign up for relief because government websites were poorly designed, so free software was banished from evacuation centers and people fell back to pen and paper. To top it all off, Microsoft used the opportunity to expand their grip on public education and small business with state funded, strings attached deals. I can only imagine what they will do in Haiti, where there’s less to milk when all is done.
The Perl CPAN Testers have been suffering issues accessing their sites, databases and mirrors. According to a posting on the CPAN Testers’ blog, the CPAN Testers’ server has been being aggressively scanned by “20-30 bots every few seconds” in what they call “a dedicated denial of service attack”; these bots “completely ignore the rules specified in robots.txt”.
Microsoft’s own servers also act as drivers of DDoS attacks (when hijacked) and as sources of referrer SPAM (as a matter of design) [1, 2]. It’s probably worst when DNS goes down due to Microsoft.
From Microsoft’s point of view, the deal will help ward off the threat of Linux-based solutions in businesses, while HP can count a near-guaranteed revenue stream from Microsoft-centric customers.
Secret/exclusionary deals are related to the exploitation of natural disaster, but they are not quite the same. Both are means of imposing the use of inferior software through loopholes, euphemistic bribes, and back doors. █
Maybe the solution is cleaner if Yahoo continues to strengthen ties with Microsoft, before ultimately being absorbed by them. Then the three (RIM, Microsoft, Yahoo) could combine forces in the mobile market.
A report that VMware has bid for Yahoo’s Zimbra, an open source email and collaboration company, has shocked VMware users and observers.
Watch what else Microsoft’s deal is causing. From TechCrunch:
Anxious Yahoo BOSS Developers To Speak With DOJ About Microsoft Deal
In July 2008, Yahoo announced a radical new product called BOSS, or “Build Your Own Search Service” that lets developers tap into Yahoo’s core search index with an unprecedented amount of flexibility. Now, in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal that was announced last summer, the future of BOSS is uncertain. That’s bad news for the many developers who have built projects on the BOSS APIs, some of whom are building businesses off of the service. Now, after being met with months of silence and uncertainty, some BOSS developers are taking action: they’ve scheduled a conference call with the Department of Justice to discuss their concerns.
Carol Bartz has already been slammed by Yahoo! investors for her insanely-submissive deal with Microsoft, but she gives herself a “B-Minus” nonetheless [1, 2]. It is wrong to ask a person — any person for that matter — to assess himself/herself. Bartz is now saying that she ought to have sold out to Microsoft even sooner.
She says she could have moved faster to reorganize the company and strike a Web-search agreement with Microsoft (MSFT). (Microsoft publishes MSN Money.)
Amazing, eh?
Well, Yahoo! as a search engine will become history (probably like Altavista) and Bong’s [sic] chances in Asia, where Yahoo! has been more successful thus far, remain terribly slim. It has the wrong name to begin with, and not just because of trademarks.
Clearly, without a doubt Microsoft didn’t do their homework regarding Bing. When fortune cookies say “learn Chinese” and calls your search engine a disease it raises all sorts of red flags.
Anyone speak Chinese? Is this accurate or just some funny prank. Does the word “bing” mean Disease? If it is, it’s classic. Goes along the lines of the worst possible names for companies.
Steve Ballmer might say that Bong [sic] is a “cancer” that he hopes will “attach itself to everything it touches.” It just won’t work. If $100,000,000 in marketing did almost nothing, then it’s a lost cause.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show that his company’s Bing search engine will be the default option on new computers made by Hewlett-Packard, which could have a measurable change on the search engine optimization (SEO) landscape.
Google is under fire in Germany for “lack of transparency” when it comes to data, but it’s same with Google’s rivals, Microsoft included.
Germany’s minister of justice has chastised internet giant Google over its business strategy and “lack of transparency” regarding user data.
It’s like the Asa Dotzler incident all over again. Why is Microsoft not chastised for doing the same thing not just on the Internet but on people’s desktops too? It’s even done without users’ permission. █
Summary: A lot of news about distributions and vendors that let Microsoft have its way with Linux
SUSE (SLES/SLED)
Over the course of two weeks (including CES in the second week), a lot has happened in terms of new products. But just as a decade ended, SJVN decided to put together this list of key events which include the important buyout:
I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “The authors of GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) were invited to join Peer-to-Patent to review HP’s recent patent on a very old technique for implementing bignums because their software might infringe. Basically, HP’s patent claims choosing an exponent based on processor word size. If you choose a 4-bit word size and a binary number, you end up working in hexadecimal. Or for a computer with a 16-bit word and a base-10 number, you use base 10,000 so that each digit of the base-10,000 number would fit into a single 16-bit word. The obvious problem with that is that there’s plenty of prior art here. Someone who spent a few minutes Googling found that Knuth describing the idea in TAOCP Vol. 2 and other citations go back to 1912 (which implemented the same algorithm using strips of cardboard and a calculating machine). None of this can be found in the ‘references cited’ section. Even though the patent examiner did add a couple of references, they appear to have cited some old patents. The patent issued a few months ago was filed back in October of 2004, and collected dust at the USPTO for some 834 days.”
Also in the news we have the following updates regarding the Nokia/Apple case [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]:
Nokia last week asked a federal court to block Apple from importing virtually any of Apple’s current hardware into the U.S., including the iPhone, iPod and Mac lines.
The lawsuit — the second Nokia has filed against Apple in the patent war that broke out last October — is nearly identical to the complaint the Finnish phone manufacturer filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on Dec. 29. In that complaint, Nokia also demanded that Apple be barred from bringing “all of Apple’s electronic devices that infringe one or more claims of the Asserted Patents” into the U.S.
As we wrote some days ago, embargo never advances science or innovation. █
Summary: News about Free software that Microsoft is “taxing” using unnamed software patents (Ballnux distributions) with the consent/cooperation of the distributors
ANOTHER week goes by and later on we will show that Novell is losing its “Linux” focus. Among the news we can find SUSE mentioned, but not as much as it used to. Here in The Register there is news about Red Hat abandoning Itanium (it’s about time). Tim uses this as an opportunity to describe what he sees as an opportunity for SUSE.
Summary: Microsoft’s “OEM watch list” is out in textual form, with interpretation
TODAY’s Comes vs Microsoft exhibit is Exhibit px04275[PDF], which we conveniently describe as the “OEM hit list”. Wallclimber has helped us clean it up, reconstruct tables, and she has also extracted all the text from it. The exhibit can be found appended to this post, but here are some interesting bits worth paying attention to.
What is the “Dumbo Plan”?
Dumbo Opportunity: Dumbo Plan was presented to Minolta, who is interested in this project and will have a presentation to MSKK to prove that they can do mass-production.
“Microsoft marketing and sales jargon is truly mind-numbing stuff,” argues Wallclimber.
Watch the resistance from Dell. The ultra-aggressive [1, 2] Joachim Kempin steps in.
Dell continues to reject our WFW proposals on the basis that our offer is a financial mis-fit with their “Build-to-order” marketing model and our per copy pricing is too high. Executive discussion between JoachimK and Joel Kocher yielded no progress.
Having looked at this exhibit, one regular reader of ours wrote: “It’s Microsoft’s “watch list” of OEMs and ISVs, so they can target those who stray from Windows, with their usual racketeering methods. The goal is 100% market saturation of pre-installed systems, and the method is intimidation and blackmail, specifically – the threat of revoking their right to distribute Windows systems if they support anything other than Windows (via secret MoU signed under NDA). Since the DOJ judgement, the new threat is a reduction of volume discounts on licenses, which then reduces the OEMs competitiveness. New method, same racketeering.”
As the items at the beginning of this document show, Microsoft pressures the already-impoverished companies in the East. “Interesting that the Far East OEMs were feeling the pain of deep price cuts while Microsoft’s revenue was exceeding their budget in most areas of the Far East,” alleges one person. █
Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft – exhibit px04275, as text
