A long analysis at http:// /bms/departments/innovation.shtml suggests that its only verifiable ones are the “talking paperclip” in Office, and Microsoft “Bob”, a sort of dumbed-down computing. (There are some pending, though; the jury is still out.) Neither of these is a great gift to computing, exactly.In addition, the company’s rise to the top has always been helped by its willingness to manipulate in order to achieve an advantage. It broke antitrust law to destroy Netscape when that start-up’s technology seemed to threaten the dominance of Windows. When it was brought to trial for doing so, it kept on obfuscating, driving Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to the point of fury.There was Bill Gates’s famously hostile video deposition, the claim that Windows Explorer could not be extricated from the operating system (backed up by doctored videos), and the flooding of newspapers with letters of support – which had been, reportedly, written by PRs who paid real people to sign their names. It was even alleged that the letters of support were signed with dead peoples’ names.On that scale, perhaps you can understand that Microsoft’s reaction to the latest fiasco was to laugh it off.
“I don’t think it’s damaging,” said Windows product manager Charmaine Gravning. “People are just having fun with it.”Gravning explained away the testimonials as the work of an “outside marketing group” that had not been approved by Microsoft managers, but insisted that it reflected “the writer’s true experience”. She also argued that Microsoft would never actually stoop to respond to Apple’s advertising campaign “It’s not our tactics,” she said. “Why would we stomp on Apple when we have 95 per cent of the market?”But why put it up on the Microsoft site at all? And why then take it down, and the other “testimonial”? Maybe Microsoft regards such actions as trivial. But it’s clearly been stung.The embarrassment comes at a crucial time for the company.
A federal judge is still considering whether to approve the antitrust settlement reached between Microsoft and the Justice Department. Though these events won’t affect the judgement, they’re the sort of incidents that can be used by opponents to argue that the settlement represents absurdly lenient terms, offered by a Justice Department in cahoots with big business.And it’s not only the courts that Microsoft still has to worry about. It needs to win the trust of corporations and consumers worldwide if it’s to succeed in its central long-term plans.The problem remains that Microsoft has difficulties persuading people to trust it, both in what it does and what it offers. Take its .Net strategy, which envisages Microsoft dominating an internet-centric world, in which users would entrust their personal information to an alliance of Microsoft-sanctioned sites.Microsoft’s potential commercial partners balked at the grandiose plan that would have made the corporation an intermediary in almost every online transaction Consumer aversion has hastened the plan’s demise. It still lives on, but just over a week ago hackers got into Microsoft’s beta-testing server for .Net and stole copies of the unreleased products there.
