Wall Street Journal: Microsoft Uses Open-Source Code
Despite Denying Use of Such Software. Microsoft acknowledged its repeated use of open-source code Friday, in response to questions about the matter. Just two days earlier, it had specifically denied the existence of any such software at Hotmail.
Reporters who cover Microsoft have long become accustomed to the dismal fact that statements by the company and its PR people all too frequently turn out to be misleading or outright wrong. The brazenness of the lie to the Journal’s Lee Gomes is remarkable all the same.
Here’s my favorite line in today’s excellent Journal story: “A Microsoft spokesman said he couldn’t explain why Microsoft had given out incorrect information on the topic.”
Here’s my theory: It’s in the corporate DNA. Microsoft treats truth like a tactic — if it’s useful, fine. If not, no biggie. Tell the reporter, or the customer, anything he or she wants to hear. If it’s a lie, no biggie. The press has such a short attention span that we’ll come back for more tomorrow, and the customers have almost no choices left, anyway, so no biggie.
I had it happen last week, when the company insisted that a Web site’s no-SmartTags meta-tag could not be overridden by a Web user’s choices. This may turn out to be true in the end, now that Web site designers went correctly ballistic about the way our favorite monopolist had planned to co-opt their content. A PR guy, in an e-mail exchange, appears to be claiming that this was intended all along. Yeah, right.
(Do you have examples of Microsoft’s truth-shading? Let me know.)
The most interesting part of the Journal piece today is the way the deception was uncovered. A BSD developer read the Journal’s previous story, which contained the false claim, and checked for himself. he apparently contacted Gomes — open-source journalism at its finest.
All of this reminds me of a great line from Infoworld columnist Nick Petreley a few years ago. He wrote, in this trenchant but accurate column:
“After all, how do you give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt when you know that if you throw it into a room with truth, you’d risk a matter/anti-matter explosion?”
ALSO
Dave Winer and Jim Romenesko are pointing to this morning’s edition of The Register, which notes MSNBC’s peculiar handling of last Thursday’s Journal story on this topic. MSNBC, co-owned by Microsoft, reprints some Journal stories on its site every day. This one contained some suspicious editing changes favoring its corporate parent, as the Register observed. UPDATE: WSJ.com’s liaison to MSNBC says it isn’t true (scroll down to Megan Doscher’s letter), and offers a plausible explanation.
Again, do you have examples of Microsoft’s truth-shading? Let me know.