In lieu of the recent flurry of repeated arguments about how somehow Microsoft is the good guy in gaming, and how they are fighting in good faith for real competition, I decided to take us through their endeavours over the years. I'll be focusing on two aspects - Astroturfing and stifling competition.
Starting with Astroturfing, Microsoft is no stranger to working with "Advocate Marketing" services or content creators in order to buy in public opinion towards their platform. Let's not fool ourselves, a lot of companies do this, like Sony did with their PSP viral marketing campaign, but so far that seems to be an isolated case 16 years ago. Microsoft on the other hand, has been known to push the envelope in finding new and creative ways to engage with their audience. Let's take a look.
First, we have their engagement with "Social Chorus", a company known for, pretty much, providing astroturfing services.
Their website has since removed client testimonials, but fortunately we have access to the wayback machine, which provide us with a handy list of clients. One of them is, unsurprisingly, windows phone.
Social Chorus was also used to promote Internet Explorer, an application we'll be talking about later.
But what about youtube? That's another venture that Microsoft dwelled on and that caused waves in the community back in 2013/14, when Youtube personalities, including popular channel Machinima, were paid by MS to promote their Xbox One console. While promotion in itself is not a problem, the terms of said promotion were right into astroturfing territory.
From PCWorld
You can find a copy of the agreement with Machinima here.
These tactics have been expanded to places such as Wikipedia, where microsoft offered to pay a software engineer to edit wikipedia on OpenDocumetForma and Microsoft Office Open XML.
Washington Post article
Wikipedia Entrance
Some more additional documentation on Microsofts history with astroturfing can be found here and here. Highly recommended articles. Snippet of one of them below:
Now onto stifling competition, something I'd argue Microsoft is as much if not more proficient at, rarely behaving in good faith when competing with other products. We can start this by discussing Microsoft Corp. v. Commission. To make matters short, it started with complaints about licensing issues and ended up with discussions around integrated services in windows, namely Windows Media Player. The more interesting bit is the argumentation used by MS, which is not too dissimilar to the one they're using today.
What about United States v. Microsoft Corporation? Here, the US government "accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the personal computer (PC) market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java."
What's the argument, again?
I'm sorry, I didn't read it right
I would also highly recommend the following video. It goes in depth on the CMA document, but the fun part starts at 28 minutes.
CMA document here.
Starting with Astroturfing, Microsoft is no stranger to working with "Advocate Marketing" services or content creators in order to buy in public opinion towards their platform. Let's not fool ourselves, a lot of companies do this, like Sony did with their PSP viral marketing campaign, but so far that seems to be an isolated case 16 years ago. Microsoft on the other hand, has been known to push the envelope in finding new and creative ways to engage with their audience. Let's take a look.
First, we have their engagement with "Social Chorus", a company known for, pretty much, providing astroturfing services.
Their website has since removed client testimonials, but fortunately we have access to the wayback machine, which provide us with a handy list of clients. One of them is, unsurprisingly, windows phone.
Social Chorus was also used to promote Internet Explorer, an application we'll be talking about later.
But what about youtube? That's another venture that Microsoft dwelled on and that caused waves in the community back in 2013/14, when Youtube personalities, including popular channel Machinima, were paid by MS to promote their Xbox One console. While promotion in itself is not a problem, the terms of said promotion were right into astroturfing territory.
From PCWorld
You can find a copy of the agreement with Machinima here.
These tactics have been expanded to places such as Wikipedia, where microsoft offered to pay a software engineer to edit wikipedia on OpenDocumetForma and Microsoft Office Open XML.
Washington Post article
Wikipedia Entrance
Some more additional documentation on Microsofts history with astroturfing can be found here and here. Highly recommended articles. Snippet of one of them below:
Now onto stifling competition, something I'd argue Microsoft is as much if not more proficient at, rarely behaving in good faith when competing with other products. We can start this by discussing Microsoft Corp. v. Commission. To make matters short, it started with complaints about licensing issues and ended up with discussions around integrated services in windows, namely Windows Media Player. The more interesting bit is the argumentation used by MS, which is not too dissimilar to the one they're using today.
What about United States v. Microsoft Corporation? Here, the US government "accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the personal computer (PC) market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java."
What's the argument, again?
I'm sorry, I didn't read it right
I would also highly recommend the following video. It goes in depth on the CMA document, but the fun part starts at 28 minutes.
CMA document here.
