Microsoft Threatens Startups Over Account Info 156
HangingChad writes "According to Fortune, there are reports that Microsoft is trying to strong arm startups to give preferential treatment to MSN Messenger and are using account information as leverage. 'If the company wants to offer other IM services (from Yahoo, Google or AOL, say), Messenger must get top billing. And if the startup wants to offer any other IM service, it must pay Microsoft 25 cents a user per year for a site license.' Of course, if the company is willing to use Messenger exclusively 'fee will be discounted 100 percent.' Getting detailed information is difficult as many of the companies being approached are afraid of reprisals."
They are all playing the lock in game (Score:5, Interesting)
Open Identity systems such as OpenID are the way to go. But how do we break open the proprietary lock? Tim Berners-Lee told me to look at FOAF but we still need to complete the integration into the authentication systems.
Re:They are all playing the lock in game (Score:5, Interesting)
You can export your links to other people in these schemes but the inbound links point in the same place, you can take your data but not your network.
One step forward here is that Google blogger has at last allowed people to use their own domain name with their blog. So you can move your blog to a different host if you please.
Re:They are all playing the lock in game (Score:5, Insightful)
What about Intellectual Property? (Score:5, Insightful)
An interesting position, if we the people would be allowed to claim it. Since I'm the keeper of the information in my computer, does it mean I own the intellectual property?!...
Yes, I know, there's a difference between "data" an "information". But my list of contacts isn't something that arose spontaneously, we aren't talking about phone books here. I worked for years to meet all the people in my list. That's information that has been carefully collected and organized, it's not like taking a list of everybody who lives in a city and ordering by last name.
That list of contacts is *MY* data, *MY* property and *I* should have the final word about it!
Re:What about Intellectual Property? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps all your lists are belonging to them.
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Not when you store it on *MY* server. If you want to retain control of your data, then don't give it to me.
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Interesting...
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Re:They are all playing the lock in game (Score:5, Insightful)
We're their product.
Marketing companies are their customers.
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"Our data"? Is that even a legal position to take?
You know, I was all ready to "hear hear" that sentiment, and then I thought of the Postal Service. The content of a letter is mine (keep it simple and bypass copyright, etc), but the responsibility of delivery is theirs. They can't lose it, have it stolen, altered, copied or viewed by anyone (again, simplify) without "failing" their purpose. Same goes for the IM handlers, I guess. Having control over the in- and out- points, along with the channels between is just easier to meet the responsibilities.
Re:They are all playing the lock in game (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually, the DOJ is going to have to put (Score:2)
They make nothing except for inadequate OSs and threats.
Re:Not really... (Score:5, Insightful)
Acording to TFA it was the social networking sites that were trying to hook in.
OK so you don't like Microsoft's tactics, don't get a Hotmail account. What I find rather more objectionable is the amount of social networking spam I have been getting from new social networking sites trying to gain critical mass.
In one week I received email from three new networks trying to start up, each one was playing the 'download all the contacts and spam them' game.
Flaming Microsoft is fun but after the first decade or so it got old. I gave that up in '98 or so. Rather more interesting is working out what we can do to change the game.
In the dotCrime Manifesto I proposed a mashup of OpenID/SAML/WS-* on the authentication side, FOAF as contact interchange medium, DNS SRV records as the discovery mechanism. The objective being to create an identity system in which end users own and control their own data.
Finding folk who are upset enough to flame Microsoft is rather easier than finding folk interested in writing or deploying code that might change the situation.
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Well duh, that's easy. Try getting your mail out of Hotmail without using Windows+Outlook
Last I checked, Hotmail was accessible from many browsers, including Firefox and Safari, neither of which requires Windows nor Outlook. Has that suddenly changed? Or are you so out of date that you missed the entire *web*mail fad?
Can you please think before making an ass out of yourself. Being critical of a company for no fucking reason is just as bad as being a retarded fanboy.
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Heavy Foot (Score:5, Interesting)
Drop Microsoft! Just drop them. Stop using them. They are old anyway. Let's come up with something NEW!
Backfires inc!
Re:Heavy Foot (Score:5, Funny)
You're actually suggesting there are viable substitutes for Hotmail?!@!?
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I'm not an MS fan, but this sort of thing does irritate me. They are *not* strongarming startups. What they are doing is trying to find ways of monetizing their services. These services are free to end users, but why should they be free for other businesses to use? I can't see why. How is it reasonable to use another companies product to make money without paying for that usage? Only if the company wants it to be used for free, and Microsoft doesn't. That's their
Re:Heavy Foot (Score:5, Insightful)
and, naturally, if they weren't being deceitful (Score:2)
Submitted this to the original article; no idea if it'll show up.
I think rob/ahoutx/maddawg are missing the point. Exclusivity and top billing have nothing to do with security.
MS COULD demand certain security measures or, more uniformly, require the service to send the user to MSN where they must agree to a warning about how this startup may do lord knows to their info. It should be up to the user.
Keep in mind that if this article is accurate, they are NOT do
Monetize yes, Service not so much (Score:3, Informative)
"And besides, 25 cents per user per year?"
Not a huge number, but "25 cents per user per year per relevant dataset" would be a dealbreaker for every startup I know.
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Um, no. They're monetizing people using _other_ companies services. You get it for free if you _only_ offer the MS service, you have to pay to if you want to offer someone elses service.
Best thing to do is to just hang up on them if they call. It's not a company that will ever learn, and history shows that any deals made with Microsoft has only one winner and it ain't you.
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Oh, by the way, dude: If I sell you a computer, and you then purchase hardware from someone other than me, you must pay me 25 cents per person-device-year. Sounds pretty fucking stupid to me. But I suppose if businesses want to do business with people like Microsoft, it serves them right.
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Evil is Microsoft's most important product? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft: Do evil if evil makes money? Or, Microsoft: Evil is our most important product, making money is secondary?
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not EQUAL sets maybe, but a good chunk of intersection =).
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From what limited inside knowledge I have, the motto is "Make money." Evil has nothing to do with it, aside from the fact that the overwhelming desire to make lots and lots of money can be thoroughly evil. "Love of money is the root of all evil", Ecclesiastes something or other, or maybe something else. Not entirely true, since there's other evils, but at least there's a pretty old and possibly authoritative principle here.
Re:Evil is Microsoft's most important product? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the quote from Ecclesiastes is "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." The missing word is quite significant. For some reason it's one of the most often misquoted scriptures.
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My apologies, thank you for the correction. The usual form I see is "Money is the root of all evil", which is even farther from the original.
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gmack said:
Actually the quote from Ecclesiastes is "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." The missing word is quite significant. For some reason it's one of the most often misquoted scriptures.
...and is apparently often misattributed as well, since that quote comes from Timothy 6:10, not Ecclesiastes.
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And of course translations differ, I see one does actually omit the "missing" word here. [scripturetext.com]
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Using the usual transliteration method for Greek in an ASCII environment:
r(i/za ga\r pa/ntwn tw=n kakw=n e)stin h( filarguri/a ...
The root of all evil [things] is the love of money.
The word kakon (kakw=n) is a plural adjective converted to a substantive by the article ton (tw=n). ton kakon is the usual phrase for "bad stuff". The single word for love of money is philarguria. Another translation might be "The root of all evil things is avarice." It most certainly is NOT "all kinds of evil" in a sens
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Back to the article it really makes you wonder why commercial web companies choose to remain customers of M$, surely they should have learned by now, that as soon as M$ sees the opportunity to screw them over they will.
Ballmer has created an aggressive anti-customer culture at M$ that ensures this will happen time and time again, it takes real effort to earn billy goat as
Bill Gates is said to be depressed -- A "sorrow"? (Score:2)
"For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." -- New American Standard Bible [scripturetext.com]
"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil: which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows." -- American Standard Version [asvbible.com]
But most of the other translations leave out "all kinds of" and say "al
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Bill Gates disagrees with Paul of Tarsus. (Score:2)
It seems that Bill Gates is admired for only one thing, being the richest person. I have never heard of anyone admiring Bill Gates for anything else. Apparently people don't want to be him.
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Gates has been VERY self- and other-destructive. (Score:2)
Companies like Microsoft and Coca-Cola have found that pretending to be charitable is a very good way to get people to ignore their extremely predatory business practices, in my opinion.
So, the real question (Score:5, Interesting)
What amazes me, is that MS does not buy companies who are on their platform. They just strongarm them and steal as be needed. Instead, they buy companies who could represent a threat to their platform or are making money hand over fist (the 2 tend to go hand in hand). So, by being in Windows, a startup not only pays much higher costs, but they also kill off a huge chunk of the market that would otherwise drive up their price, and then subject themselves to MS's hand.
Oblig. Simpsons Ref. - 5F11 - Das Bus (Score:3, Funny)
HOMER
Oh, they have the Internet on computers now!
MARGE
Homer, Bill Gates is here.
HOMER
Bill Gates?! Millionaire computer nerd Bill Gates! Oh my god. Oh my god. Get out of sight, Marge. I don't want this to look like a two-bit operation.
Marge groans and rolls her eyes. Bill Gates and two "associates" enter.
GATES
Mr. Simpson?
HOMER
You don't look so rich.
GATES
Don't let the haircut fool you, I am exceedingly wealthy.
HOMER
(quietly to Marge)
It's security, stupid (Score:5, Funny)
Mess them up! (Score:3, Informative)
On a somewhat related note, have Vista users noticed the new 'Live' programs available optionally through Windows Update?
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http://www.pidgin.im/ [pidgin.im]
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I thought video chat was considered bloat in an Instant Message client.
Re Live in Windows update (Score:2)
On a somewhat related note, have Vista users noticed the new 'Live' programs available optionally through Windows Update?
No...? I've just had a thorough look around the Vista Windows Update window, and there's nothing in there at all about Live programs. I've only ever had updates for Windows. What exactly are you referring to?
(There is a link which says "Get updates for more products" which takes you to a page where you can download Microsoft update (as opposed to Windows updated) which presumably would give you updates to Live products, but you have to actively choose to install that).
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Anal ogy (Score:5, Funny)
Broken up (Score:2)
Parity Error (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh really? What about Secure Audio Path and the other draconian DRM measures in Windows.
Microsoft must be running for public office. Say one thing, do another.
Enjoy,
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Heh. Actually, they (i.e., their top officers) don't seem to be running for any public office. But they are giving a lot of "campaign contributions" (aka legal bribery) to politicians who are.
The textbook example is the 2000 US election. Before that, Microsoft had done very little in the way of financial support for politicians. In 2000, MS suddenly became one of the biggest corporate contributors. They mostly gave to republicans, i
Security wasn't hardly mentioned (Score:4, Insightful)
It's still the "data doark ages" (Score:2)
How is this acceptable? It's like paying an indulgence to the Pope for your sins every year so you can keep committing sins. If I'm entrusting my data to someone else then adequate security should be MANDATORY.
During their audit, they might just happen to find that Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL and MySQL aren't as 'secure' as MSSQL, and 'suggest' that companies
Uh-huh... (Score:4, Informative)
I promptly deleted the credit card info, changed the user info, scrambled the password by mashing the keyboard with a copy&paste and changed the email to a free Hushmail account that would go away in 30 days.
They've since changed that practice, but MS hasn't offered me anything worthwhile to bring me back.
Easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)
On your social networking/Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, whatever site allow users to import from AIM, YIM and Google. However for MSN, grey out the option and next to it in red put "Due to legal pressure by Microsoft, if you use MSN, you must manually import your contacts" and give a link to a tedious page that restates this reason and make them upload them one at a time.
Naturally users are going to be rather upset at MS and wonder if maybe they should switch to AIM instead.
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Do you really believe that?
While a technical person might react like this, they're not the target group. If a teenager has his clique on MSN, nothing will change that.
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Spark (Score:2)
last company used MSN(seemed stripped down), didn't do any more than spark
Some thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not an economist, but placing barriers on the export of contact information from Hotmail reduces the value of the Hotmail service. If the cost to move a particular piece of data from within one system to any other is higher than moving it in the other direction, its value inside that high cost system is lower by that amount.
Could someone please explain? (Score:3, Interesting)
For those of us who don't use any of these services, could someone please clarify what is at issue. As I understand it, the problem is that people who have a contact list on a Microsoft service want to be able to use that contact list for some other company's service. Can't they just save their contacts in a file that the other services can import? Surely Microsoft has no claim to the data itself and therefore no way to interfere with importing such a file. It sounds like the other services are trying to connect to the Microsoft service and that that is what gives Microsoft something to say about it. Why do they need to do this?
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I see. Amazing. That does kind of let you know that they don't intend you to control your own data, doesn't it?
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Well, yes; but their policy is that it isn't your data, it's theirs. I've read quite a number of Microsoft EULAs, TOSs, and other pseudo-contracts that state explicitly in the fine print that any data placed on their servers becomes the property of Microsoft. To my knowledge, this hasn't been tested in the courts yet (though it'd be interesting to read of test cases), so it's possible that such terms are legal a
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Fortunately, I don't use any Microsoft products or services so I haven't encountered this, but if the basis for the claim is a general statement in a EULA, it probably isn't valid. In the United States, a copyright can only be transferred by an explicit written agreement. Generalities like "anything you place on our server" don't satisfy this requirement. So even if the EULA is valid in general, it is probably not valid as an assignment of copyright.
The Practical Limits of Information Technology (Score:2, Interesting)
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I don't think the problem is that is technologically complicated. I think that it is a matter of mindset. Most people will simply not consider doing something with their computers unless it is advertised to them as a service. If you ha
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Well, the Web does make information flow easy - if both parties want the information to flow. I don't think any of us would approve of a Web that makes our information flow o
Okay that's fine (Score:2, Insightful)
Security (Score:2)
MS also makes the claim that the users data is the users' data and then out of the other side of their mouth make a claim about how it took them 12 years
All Your Data Are Belong To Us (Score:2, Insightful)
standard practice (Score:3, Insightful)
Serious question: Has anyone ever worked with MS and hasn't been fucked with?
Giving out passwords (Score:2)
The article's comments talk about people freely giving out their MSN account passwords. This practice of giving away your credentials began way back in the 90s when certain webmail websites would offer to "collect" your pop or imap mail and aggregate it into their own mail. We used to lock the accounts of anyone we caught doing this because it violated our AUP about revealing your account credentials to third parties. Eventually we just gave up and simply removed access that that id/password would give
Re:Why isn't IM distributed? (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, google's IM protocol is based on Jabber. [jabber.org]
from their about page:
Re:Why isn't IM distributed? (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, Jabber (as used by Google Talk) is distributed. You can log on with to any Jabber server you have an account with, and you should be able to talk to users on any other Jabber server. Google just happen to have a lot of people with accounts on their Jabber server.
Re:Why isn't IM distributed? (Score:5, Informative)
As other pointed out (Score:2)
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I read an article from an MS person the other day stating that MS were in the process of designing a new proprietary protocol to replace the existing MSN one and were working on some method of allowing interoperability with Google. I was left thinking that using XMPP instead of a new proprietary thing would have been a good start if they wanted interop
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I think the most frightening thought of all is what would the net be like if it was designed from the ground up by the likes of MS & AOL a decade ago. In reality the
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Are you sure that it hasn't been? I run an ejabberd server for my company for internal IM, but we didn't exactly take out an ad to announce it. I think Jabber/XMPP are probably a lot more widespread than you'd think.
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I'm continually amazed by the number of businesses who discuss their top secret business deals over MSN... I mean, sure - Microsoft probably aren't analysing your IMs, but do you want to take the risk when you could just set up your own XMPP server and keep the conversations local?
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I'm continually amazed by the number of businesses who discuss their top secret business deals over MSN... I mean, sure - Microsoft probably aren't analysing your IMs, but do you want to take the risk when you could just set up your own XMPP server and keep the conversations local?
That is precisely the argument that convinced my boss. We send all sorts of information through our internal server: passwords, account information, etc. Since the service has its S2S function disabled and is on a machine with a private IP anyway, it's as safe as anything else on our network.
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Actually, they are - that was my point. A *lot* of businesses use MSN for messaging between colleagues. It's quite stupid.
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If the likes of MS had been given the opportunity to control these services then the internet today would be a truly appalling place - think of the IM mess branched out to *every* protocol.
Sounds rather like the original MSN and AOL to me. The only reason they didn't take off was because the Internet (or probably more precisely, the World Wide Web) ha
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Re:Very confused by new Slashdot post filter thing (Score:2)
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'The blade on ole' Excalibur here is a bit scuffed, and just before I go battle the Green Knight (read: RIAA, Microsoft, whatever)'
'Well, here, try this Ginsu knife!'
Your solution is funny, but just not effective.
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But I was dabbling in a bit of jerkofferry, I admit.
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MSN messenger has been bundled with windows for a while now and gives microsoft an unfair advantage on the IM market (nearly everyone buying a computer, gets windows and so windows messenger (which is a stripped down version of MSN messenger)). ... In other words: they're trying to use their dominant market position, which was gained by illegal means, to force companies to strengthen Microsoft's position in the market even further. I wonder what the EU will think of this kind behavior from Microsoft.
Nice rant, pity it doesn't have a foundation. MSN messenger (/WIndows Live messenger) hasn't been bundled with Windows for over a year now; probably precisely because of worries about EU intervention.