● 02.16.11

●● Microsoft is Bribing Teachers Again, Maybe Others Too

Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Search, Windows at 3:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft is bribing schoolteachers to recommend B0ng (Microsoft’s Google scraper); pro-Microsoft decision at the German Foreign Office “smells like bribery” says a developer, Mirco “MacSlow” Müller

“Microsoft pays teachers to promote Bing to their students,” writes a reader of ours who links to this new page. Bribes for search market share (buying the market rather than earning it) are nothing new from Microsoft [1, 2], but this is an all-time low, adding to the Gates Foundation‘s intervention in education for its own selfish needs and bribing of professors (we made a mirror after the original report had vanished).

According to this new blog post about the German Foreign Office going back to Windows, there is again a suspicion of Microsoft bribes and its source is quite reliable:

This smells like bribery in action if you ask me.[...]From reading summaries on the real reasons, it apparently came down to drivers (for printers and scanners), which they probably bought at Lidl or Aldi (german discount-chains), instead of spending a minute or two on the web researching what devices are properly supported. Another issue was educating staff about different office-applications and making them deal with a slightly different UI-layout *rolling.eyes* WTF… after ten years they could not adapt to something new!? Who are they trying to kid?This is leads to an terrifying conclusion. IT-staff and clerks working at our foreign offices are less computer literate than my parents and friends (all non-geeks). Or the other way around, people like my parents and friends could work at the foreign offices and help saving valuable tax-money. (ok this last paragraph is stretching it a bit far, but you get my point)

As we showed here before (linking to reports from the commercial press), Steve Ballmer tried to sort of bribe Munich after it had declared plans to move to GNU/Linux [1, 2]. At Microsoft, “bribe” is not a dirty word (although it typically gets euphemised); history teaches that it’s just a business strategy. See our EDGI pages (leaked Microsoft documents). █

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