Microsoft's media/public manipulations? | Linux Today

Microsoft’s media/public manipulations?

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Nov 16, 1998

An anonymous reader contributed this information to us.

I thought this little tidbit might provide more documentation of
Microsoft’s media/public manipulations.

Here is *yet another* creative way that Microsoft gets its
marketing message across, which I just discovered today. After all
the “Halloween Memo” fuss the last couple weeks, it would make
sense to go to the MS website to see what they have to say about
it. So I went there and did a search on “Linux.” Not too
surprisingly, the first hit returned looked like this:

1. Microsoft Responds to the Open Source Memo Regarding the Open
Source Model and Linux

What was surprising was that it took you to this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/news/mwarv/unixaddon.asp

The title of the page is “Windows NT Services for UNIX Add-On
Pack Released to Manufacturing.” The word “Linux” doesn’t even
appear on the page. So they’ve managed to turn all this interest in
Linux into a lot of free publicity for their own “Unix” software
running on NT. Maybe it was nothing. Probably a genuine mistake.
Yeah right.

Incidentally, search results #2 and #3 (“Microsoft Responds to
Internal Memo Regarding the Open Source Model and Linux”) goes to
the correct page (http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/highlights/editorletter.asp).

Manipulating search engines on their website? Not illegal,
but certainly misleading. -lt ed

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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