Slashdot Mirror
New Microsoft Dirty Tricks Revealed
Conrad Mazian writes "Robert X. Cringely has an article on the Technology Evangelist web site where he claims that Microsoft destroyed evidence in the Burst vs Microsoft case. Specifically Burst's lawyers had asked for certain emails, Microsoft claimed that they couldn't find the backup tapes the emails would be on, and while this was happening the tapes were in a vault at Microsoft — until they mysteriously disappeared. It's a fascinating story, and even names one person at Microsoft."
This is *real* journalism:
... the headline here said somehting about Microsoft's "NEW" dirty tricks? WTF?
- Nth hand unverified, information (My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious. )
- this is about stuff along time ago.
- There is a lot suspect in what's being claimed in the article as well.
Well, as the tagline says:
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
It's a fascinating story, and even names one person at Microsoft.
Oooh! It names someone at Microsoft. I'll tell you, but you gotta keep it a secret, okay? Bill Gates. Shhhh, don't tell anyone I told you...
This guy's the limit!
Microsoft was saying that it couldn't find the tapes and that it would take millions of man-hours to search for them ...
And Microsoft wants to be number one in search?
Cringely posted the story in two parts, but the summary only links to the first. Second part here.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Enron is not gone because they broke the law and got obliterated for it, Enron is gone because the reality that they actually had no money overtook their fiction and they collapsed into overnight bankruptcy. Legal recourse against Enron only really began after it was long gone, and was against the company's directors.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
How exactly is this pandering to the Anti-Microsoft element on slashdot?
It is a story about a company that when faced with legal action regarding their behavior deliberately destroyed/hid evidence that showed they as corporate entity were perfectly aware that their behavior was wrong in the legal sense.
The fact that corporations routinely do this is completely irrelevant. All this story is exposing is a pattern of behavior on the part of Microsoft with regards to compliance with the law, or in this case a complete disregard for the law. While it may be redundant as the case against Microsoft has been made time and time again it isn't pandering to the anti-Microsoft zealots. It may be embarrassing to the pro-Microsoft evangelists, but we all know they are nuts ;-).
If Apple, Red Hat or Novell had done something similar they would be called on it. However, none of those corporate entities have done anything like that to my knowledge. But Microsoft has. And considering that Microsoft products are on ~85% of the PCs out there makes it relevant to the slashdot community.
If I remember correctly, Burst started a court case against Microsoft for patent infringement a few years ago (one of those that we all love on Slashdot), and Microsoft paid them about $60 million in settlements. The court case looked very bad for Microsoft, not because there was any evidence of any wrongdoing, but because Microsoft had "lost" emails exactly for a critical time period, but not others just before or just after that time period. These are exactly the emails that this article is about.
To the courts, it doesn't make much difference whether you say "sorry, we lost these emails by accident" and say the truth, or you say "we destroyed these emails, take that!" and say the truth or not, or whether you say "sorry, we lost these emails" and are in fact hiding them. In each case, the emails are not there, and the courts will assume that whatever they might have contained was not good for you. So whether Microsoft really lost these emails or was just hiding them, it doesn't matter.
Similar, if you are taken to court because someone claims you downloaded music illegally, and you just happen to format your harddisk by accident, you are in deep shit. And it doesn't matter whether there was evidence on that harddisk or not.