● 11.10.08

●● Ashley Highfield to Finally Get Paid by His Masters

Posted in Deception, DRM, FUD, Microsoft, Windows at 3:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

‘Pulling a Galli’

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HIS is a very significant new chapter in a long saga involving the BBC, which sold out to Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15] and discriminated against Microsoft’s rivals as a result.

Ashley Highfield was one of the main people responsible for this fiasco, which began some time around 2006 when a word came out about BBC conceding Real and going with just Microsoft media formats. That was before iPlayer emerged.

Companies are — truthfully speaking — just a set of people and it’s inevitable that people will be named here. Highfield did his damage inside the BBC, had a former Microsoft employee (Erik Huggers) inherit control and now he moves on to picking up his ‘reward’ — so to speak — from the convicted monopolist.

This is very reminiscent of the story about Peter Galli and The Register had enough integrity to give a balanced article that contains criticism.

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As director of future media and technology, Highfield cut a controversial figure at the BBC. Reg sources blamed him for the culture of commitees and waste that saw iPlayer development take several years and run millions over-budget. In the last months of his reign a new management team was brought in to rapidly develop a streaming version that has proved much more successful than the unwieldy P2P client he oversaw.

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Open source advocates also accused him of being too close to Microsoft…

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More Microsoft employees seem to be getting channeled into positions of authority inside the BBC. This is something that’s widely acknowledged by various independent sources, so there is hardly a point in denying it. Glyn Moody writes:

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Erik Huggers goes from Microsoft to the BBC, and Highfield goes from the BBC to Microsoft, via Kangaroo. Let’s keep it cosy, eh?

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Media distortion is a dreadful thing. █

“We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK and, as far as our server logs can make out, 5 per cent of those [use Macs] and around 400 to 600 are Linux users.”

–Ashley Highfield, BBC at the time (2007)

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