Microsoft's Ethical Guidelines 271
hankwang writes "Did you know that Microsoft has ethical guidelines? It's good to know that 'Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials' while lobbying for OOXML, and that 'Microsoft conducts its business in compliance with laws designed to promote fair competition' every time they suppressed competitors. In their Corporate Citizenship section, they discuss how the customer-focused approach creates products that work well with those of competitors and open-source solutions. So all the reverse-engineering by Samba and OpenOffice.org developers wasn't really necessary."
A string of meaningless words!! (Score:5, Interesting)
"....Microsoft provides a broad range of policies, programs, and products that are focused on our commitment to responsible and ethical business practices that promote user choice, industry opportunity, interoperability, and transparency....."
Last I checked Microsoft's Exchange Server works well only with IE. Unlike Gmail or Yahoo mail. Exchange is lousy with Firefox, Opera or Safari. Where is the choice?
And Exchange Server 2008 I belive even screws up the IMAP support, so Thunderbird users get the bird as well... So much for interoperability and transparency.
Ethics (Score:5, Interesting)
No bribes for OOXML, but (Score:5, Interesting)
'Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials' while lobbying for OOXML
But obviously they pay bribes to squash the Open Source Software Law in Peru [theregister.co.uk]
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Unsurprising (Score:2, Interesting)
"Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials"
Well, they were probably foreign business men, now weren't they.
"Microsoft conducts its business in compliance with laws designed to promote fair competition"
Of course they do. If they don't they get slapped with huge fines.
Also: "the customer-focused approach creates products that work well with those of competitors and open-source solutions"
Well duh. It doesn't say anything about making it easy for open-source solutions and competitors from working well with IT, though...
Re:What is a code of conduct for? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Unsurprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft isn't evil. It simply spends a lot of it's time exploring the boundaries of the law around the world. And when you explore boarders, half the time you're on one side and the rest on the other side.
All in an effort to help the children (new corporations).
So they will know "You can go this far without getting into trouble. You can go this much further, and pay a small fine after doing it for 10 years. You can go twice as far, but then the fine will be 10 times higher, but you will only have to pay it 50 years later." And so on...
Weasel words (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is a code of conduct for? (Score:5, Interesting)
Co-Ops - or Workers' Cooperative. One of the largest retailers in the UK [johnlewisp...ship.co.uk] is a Co-Op.
If you work there as a janitor - you own part of the company and thus get a vote. It's working well for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative [wikipedia.org]
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:3, Interesting)
It works, but if you tried it on IE you'd notice that you get nicer stuff like fancy context sensitive right click menus.
It was the same with hotmail for a while. They've sorted the right click menus in Firefox now, but you still can't change the ratio of inbox to reading pane.
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:5, Interesting)
From http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/09/13/428901.aspx [msexchangeteam.com]
Why doesn't Premium work on Firefox?
Before I wrap up, I'd like to address the question we often receive about why OWA Premium doesn't work in non IE browsers. The following is heavily plagiarized from others who have answered this question as well (thanks Kristian!), and if after reading this you are still unclear as to why Premium doesn't work on Firefox, please feel free to post your questions here and I'll do my best to answer them.
Shockingly, the decision to make OWA Premium only work on IE6+ has nothing to do with forcing people to use other Microsoft products (sorry to have to dispel the conspiracy, and just when Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner were starting pre-production on "OWA: The Movie "). The decision was made, simply enough, due to costs, time, and customer need.
The browser support we have for OWA Premium and OWA Light is due to usage share among our customers, and the development and test investment it takes to support additional browsers/versions. This doesn't mean the browser statistics for "browsers hitting OWA", which would be skewed based on our previous browser support. We look at the browser statistics for "browsers used on the Internet" and "browsers used within our customer organizations", as well as listening to what customers are asking for, since statistics, surveys, site logs, and research firms never tell the full story. The browser matrix of OWA is about where we allocate our investments, and the need of additional browser support as compared to the need for all the other OWA features our customers want. We have limited resources, limited time, and a very large set of potential features.
I understand it would be a PITA for them to add in support for 'premium' features in every browser, but FireFox has shown to be pretty popular in general. It's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy to say "we don't add in these features for other browsers because nobody is using those browsers for OWA". If they added in support for those features in firefox they'd probably find the percentage of users using firefox for OWA increases a lot. I know I used to fire up IE just to use OWA.
Re:What is a code of conduct for? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd rather have every person in the company own it and be responsible for running it into the ground than 1 over paid CEO who will just run away with a golden parachute if anything bad ever happens.
Re:Microsoft is just misunderstood. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds about right.
I heard that the next major version of windows will have a SQL-based file system.
And General Protection Fault / Illegal operation has occured is being enhanced.
Not only will windows now kill applications at random, but will corrupt files you were working on at random.
And the newest enhancement is corrupting files you weren't working on at random.
Because the documents you weren't working on will be stored on disk within the same binary blob.
Windows explorer will transparently open the binary blob with all lots of your documents in it as a folder, so you can still drag and drop them to other document stores or send a document as an e-mail.
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Name me one site that works in IE 7/8 but not IE6. Seriously, pick any.
Slashdot?
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, OWA for Exchange 2003 doesn't ask to install any ActiveX components so I'm not so sure.
I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to have hard-coded into IE something like "hey, this is the OWA ActiveX...it's cool...install it without asking the user regardless of the security settings they have".
Re:What is a code of conduct for? (Score:3, Interesting)
My employer's senior VPs got caught bribing middle eastern royals some years ago in a very public scandal. To atone for their sins, the corporation must implement a 23-point ethics recovery plan contrived by outside consultants. What really pisses off the rank and file employees of this multinational is that we're the ones being forced to watch to a never-ending stream of training videos (like the VD films of past eras) when it's the Rolex and pinkie ring crowd that should get the Clockwork Orange treatment. Corporate ethics, honest politicians, honor among thieves. Yeah, right.
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummm. To promote user choice within Microsoft's product line of course.
Take standards. You participate in standards in order to increase the size of the market for your goods. Then you try to capture as much as that market as possible buy creating a "superior" implementation of that standard. The fact that this locks in the customer doesn't mean the customer didn't have a choice. Anybody who has thought about vendor lock in realizes that the element of buyer choice is critical in making it possible. Microsoft doesn't put a gun to people's heads; customers put it there then invite Microsoft to hold the trigger.
Corporate ethics standards -- sensible ones anyway -- are always about enlightened self-interest. It'd be ridiculous to expect Microsoft not to drive users to IE. Or it might be visionary. But whatever that may be, it's certainly ridiculous to expect a monopolist to be a visionary. Visionary strategies are a nuisance to monopolies. Making money from a monopoly is about tactics; the only strategy there is is to preserve the monopoly.
That's probably why Bill Gates isn't that interested in Microsoft any longer. I imagine it isn't much fun any longer. Achieving a monopoly requires boldness, vision and ruthlessness. Maintaining it just requires ruthlessness.
Re:Unsurprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Mostly it was just stupid. It was Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: really pretty good hardware, but with mediocre firmware and terrible, terrible on-PC software. If they'd just left the thing hackable, every Leengux weenie in the world would have bought one to Rockbox it. But nooo, control took precedence over making some actual money.
Another example is the Xbox 360 - a great console with great games, they were even going to make a profit from it ... until they cut corners so badly that this joke is instantly understandable [today.com] and its reputation was almost irretrievably trashed. Maybe they'll get it back with the super-cheap low-end model, we'll see.
Microsoft do some great stuff. But jeez, they need to get better at it.