This is an interesting thing about M$ that should be noted - while the linux camp is so focused on noticing Microsoft's use of FUD to play down the open source market, they also quietly play their borg game with a clever application of SAS (Safety, Assuredness, Stability) to protect their own market share. By keeping the public mind in the mindset that Microsoft is the unstoppable Juggernaut of growth and domination, they can hopefully sway more users into staying in their camp or migrating to MS products.
MS is great at manipulating facts and figures to their advantage. Their propaganda team, I feel, have a very good understanding of logic - or rather what people often mistake as logic - and use that to their advantage.
A good example of this is a PDF I have lost track of that MS published to 'enlighten' users of the catastrophical drawbacks of switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, which featured an apparently well formed argument based on a logical fallacy.
The paper claimed, among other things, 2 specific items:
1. OpenOffice is not as useful as MS Office because it cannot process MS Word macros.
2. MS Word has better virus protection than OpenOffice.org writer.
The faultiness of the argument is obvious when considering that the reason OpenOffice.org doesn't have virus protection is that it is not succeptable to MS Word macro viruses, which it does not process. With this clarification, the argument is clearly flawed because it is based on false, unspecified assumptions - that Word Macros are not a method of viral infection, and that all Office suites are succeptable to the same viruses regardless of mechanism. It's cleverly hidden, and takes advantage of logical fallacy to provide seemingly accurate propaganda.
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This is an interesting thing about M$ that should be noted - while the linux camp is so focused on noticing Microsoft's use of FUD to play down the open source market, they also quietly play their borg game with a clever application of SAS (Safety, Assuredness, Stability) to protect their own market share. By keeping the public mind in the mindset that Microsoft is the unstoppable Juggernaut of growth and domination, they can hopefully sway more users into staying in their camp or migrating to MS products. MS is great at manipulating facts and figures to their advantage. Their propaganda team, I feel, have a very good understanding of logic - or rather what people often mistake as logic - and use that to their advantage. A good example of this is a PDF I have lost track of that MS published to 'enlighten' users of the catastrophical drawbacks of switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, which featured an apparently well formed argument based on a logical fallacy. The paper claimed, among other things, 2 specific items: 1. OpenOffice is not as useful as MS Office because it cannot process MS Word macros. 2. MS Word has better virus protection than OpenOffice.org writer. The faultiness of the argument is obvious when considering that the reason OpenOffice.org doesn't have virus protection is that it is not succeptable to MS Word macro viruses, which it does not process. With this clarification, the argument is clearly flawed because it is based on false, unspecified assumptions - that Word Macros are not a method of viral infection, and that all Office suites are succeptable to the same viruses regardless of mechanism. It's cleverly hidden, and takes advantage of logical fallacy to provide seemingly accurate propaganda.