Sep 05 2005
Microsoft spin concerns
eWeek has a great mini interview with Stuart Cohen, the CEO of the Open Systems Development Labs. Stuart describes a conversation with Martin Taylor, Microsoft Corp.’s general manager of platform strategy, who recently approached him to consider ways in which the two could conduct a joint research project to do some facts-based analysis of Linux and Windows. Stuart’s response is priceless:
I told him that what would happen is that we’ll invest in a 100-page report, 99.9 percent of which will be great for Linux and the acceleration of open-source software, etc., and there may be one page or just one line that will talk about something negative, something critical, something that needs improvement, and [Microsoft] will then run a $100 million advertising campaign around a single sentence from one page of a 100-page document and will ignore the other 99 pages.
Joint research project? Joint with MicroSoft? “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” comes into one’s mind. Micro$oft would only create an ‘opportunity’ to exploit it; a marketing ploy.