2007: Microsoft in Review
It’s no small secret. I hate Microsoft. I think they are the most vile and corrupt corporation in the tech industry. Their monopoly hampers innovation and they favor litigation, corruption and marketing tricks to maintain their position over simply creating great products. I have read and heard many people claim Microsoft is changing, improving, and the evil Microsoft of the pass is fading; I strongly disagree with this view, and it takes no more then a cursory look through Microsoft’s actions in 2007 to see why:
Attacking Non-Profits Seeking to Help Children in Poor Countries
Professor Negroponte wants to make the world a better place. His vision? An affordable laptop in the hands of every child. He founded a non-profit group and created the XO, an amazing machine targeted specifically at children living in poor countries, with features such as mesh networking to easily connect and share info, a screen viewable outdoors, tiny power consumption and a battery rechargeable through a solar panel.
Microsoft earlier labeled this a toy and attempted to mock it, but in 2007 as the XO began to become a reality the real attack began. Microsoft collaborated with Intel to create the Classmate, a competitor to the XO funded by big corporations to take on the little non-profit XO; they are not seeking to help children, only to prevent the XO from taking market share away from them globally (the XO uses Linux and AMD hardware).
Their attacks range from everything to badmouthing the XO laptop behinds it back, even though they had a mutual agreement not to do so, to outright bribing officials to use their laptops instead.
The sad thing is just the existence of the Classmate severely hurts the XO, as it was aiming for the cheapest price possible to offer to the countries, only able to do so through mass production; but as Microsoft and Intel are ramping up their marketing efforts to confuse or delay XO deployments in those countries, it is harder for them to go forward with the same price.
Not above crippling own products to fend off the competition
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