Assessing Media Bias: Microsoft Vs. Everyone Else 364
snydeq writes "J. Peter Bruzzese questions whether Microsoft receives unfair criticism in the media, while Apple, Facebook, and Google seem to get away from missteps unscathed. 'I've noticed an unfair, ongoing trend: If Microsoft does something a little off, it gets bashed into the ground for it. But if Google, Facebook, or Apple (all three of which can be categorized, like Microsoft, as The Man in their own rights) missteps, it generally gets mild reprimands and even support from the media and those drinking the Kool-Aid.' Do you feel any inherent media bias in its coverage of the tech industry?"
That some serious myopia (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Did Fox News write this? (Score:5, Informative)
Did Fox News write this?
J. Peter Bruzzese [twitter.com] did. He's simply a
Microsoft MVP, Triple-MCSE, MCT, MCITP: Messaging. J.P.B. is the Enterprise Windows columnist for InfoWorld and an avid Windows and Exchange advocate.
Why wouldn't he be fair and balanced?
pop quiz, Mr. J. Peter Bruzzese (Score:4, Informative)
Which of the following four companies is a convicted monopolist?
a) Microsoft
b) Apple
c) Facebook
d) Google
The correct answer is "a" (Microsoft). The leadership that festered that predatory behavior is still at Microsoft. Bill Gates is Chairman, Steve Ballmer is CEO. That's why Microsoft's actions warrant careful scrutiny.
It's unfortunate that the "editors" allowed themselves to be trolled this way.
Re:Microsoft Deserves It (Score:4, Informative)
PAGE 2 of the FA
"Why Microsoft is such a target for bashing"
Microsoft is bashed so often (unfairly, in my opinion) because of past issues and the perceptions surrounding those issues, including:
â-Microsoft was embroiled in antitrust matters. That's old news for Microsoft, but it may be novel for Apple, which is coming under government scrutiny, not that you hear much about it.
â-Microsoft products are criticized for security holes -- that Vista filled in. Thanks to 10 years of its Trustworthy Computing effort, Microsoft is a leader in teaching the Secure Development Life Cycle methodology to other companies.
â-Microsoft was criticized for not being innovative -- although the Xbox and the Kinect are two of the many areas showing just the opposite.
â-Microsoft was criticized for being closed and guarded, and for not playing nice with other ecosystems -- despite, in recent years, the amazing amount of open information through MSDN blogs and an open source forum called Codeplex. The fact that Microsoft releases software for other platforms like Mac OS X and iOS should dispel this critique.
Re:I Concur (Score:5, Informative)
I don't really see it. It looks to me like a Microsoft partisan is pulling the old "liberal media" trick of accusing everyone else to be biased so that he'll look less biased. The guy making the complaint is intricately tied to Microsoft (he's Microsoft VIP, and MSCE, a Microsoft Partner...), these are facts that he neglected to mention in the article because they might lead people to rightly believe that his reporting might have a pro-Microsoft bias.
Also I've never heard of the controversy he claims gets "so much attention". It's biased reporting of the worst sort.
Re:Microsoft Deserves It (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft Deserves It (Score:5, Informative)
Even IE 6 was good when it was released.
So I see you're not a web developer. The problem with IE was not related to the user interface, or rendering speed, or security. The problem was proprietary extensions, which to some degree were intended to replace the standards. You coded your web page the standards-compliant way, or the microsoft way, or went to awful lengths to support both.
Oh, and the user interface, rendering speed, and security were abysmal.
Re:Microsoft Deserves It (Score:2, Informative)
While Google has a 90% share in the search market I don't really think they have a monopoly. They haven't locked people into their product and if it became inferior the market share would sink like a rock. Microsoft on the hand made sure that switching away from Windows, and Word was next to impossible, much to the detriment of the Industry as a whole in my opinion. You can see how they abandoned IE and still retained huge market share for years despite having an inferior browser. Apple does have a bit of lock in with iTunes and the App Store, but the fact is the are unambiguously making the best MP3 player and the best tablet, unlike Microsoft where many people though Windows was not the best OS and didn't deserve it's market share, people feel the it is right for Apple to have the market share it does.
Re:There is a huge positive bias (Score:4, Informative)
Of course Facebook (and Google) sell your information. The only difference between them and other companies that are gathering and selling information about you is that Facebook and Google are selling your information retail instead of wholesale. The information is still being used to do the same thing: target advertising at you to convince you to act in ways that you would not have otherwise and might well be detrimental to your own interests.
Re:There is a huge positive bias (Score:4, Informative)
They've just learned to hide them better.
Their rampant and sudden(ish) adoption of HTML5 + Javascript for Win8 kind of screams E&E to me. Maybe not yet, but I suspect it will come. They have plenty of home-grown technologies that could easily be extended to provide support for all the new Metro flashies, but have chosen to roll their ball down the HTML5 slope under the slogan of "openness".
Which is great, until they decide to slam the door after a large portion of the user base has gone through it.
Think how much strife web devs have gone through over the years trying to make their sites compatible with both IE and FF (and all of their various incompatible versions.. and nowadays Safari and Chrome as well)? Well take that, and consider how fun it will be when all of those same issues apply to standalone, local applications?
And of course they've got no short history of explicitly adding proprietary extensions to open standards. They got slammed for trying to do that with Java, and hopefully that will set some precedent, but HTML5 and JS are, as far as I know, not yet legally protected from MS' tactics.
Consider how this will play out. They take a truly open standard such as HTML5, implement it as perfectly as possible. And then add something.
MS products will be able to accurately display web pages developed on Linux or OSX or any other system you care to name that follows the HTML5 standard. So it doesn't matter what the back-end is running, the front-end works beautifully.
Now add something. Doesn't have to be much, and almost certainly will be based in the client side and transparent to the server. MS products are still compatible with 100% of all HTML5 websites out there, but non-MS browsers are no longer compatible with any website that happens to use MS' extension.
Doesn't even have to be anything breaking or even terribly complex. Something like a fancier hook to the Metro UI for example -- add a start page link when IE is your default browser? Get realtime updates for.. whatever. With FF as your default browser? Get a static icon. In both cases and with both browsers, the website itself would work fine.
But those little bits of flair can add up. Imagine the usability difference it would make for something like Twitter or Facebook (or heck, Slashdot) if you had a basic feed on the desktop and didn't need to ever load up the full page unless something caught your attention?
Oh well. We can hope and pray that MS will avoid being evil this go-round, but my guess is that retrospect will eventually show a continuation of business as usual.
Re:There is a huge positive bias (Score:4, Informative)
target advertising at you to convince you to act in ways that you would not have otherwise and might well be detrimental to your own interests.
I bought a TV recently. 20 years ago I would have been forced to go to various shops and try to view it in-store. I actually did that and most of the examples were badly set up and of course shop lighting is always terrible and not representative of home viewing, and you can't really evaluate the sound.
20 years ago the only other source of information was magazine reviews, which of course were often biased. If you were lucky a friend might already own one. That was it.
These days I can use Google to dig out vast amounts of information about any model, including people's experiences posted on forums and dozens of different professional reviews. So while it is true that Google subjects me to marketing as well, I am definitely better informed and less prone to marketing hype and paid reviews. In fact I see less advertising now because I don't have to wade through ad-laden magazines or watch so much TV.
There is a trade going on but I think we came out much better than the advertisers. If your product sucks the internet is going to find out pretty quickly and a random person stood in a shop can access that knowledge from their phone to counter all your flashy displays and slimy salesmen.
Re:There is a huge positive bias (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong and wrong.
1) People were already doing AJAX-y stuff like make sequential menus (i.e., you pick your state from one menu, then another menu appears with a list of the cities in that state) with JavaScript and regular old CGIs for quite a while before MS put out XMLHttpRequest. All MS did was specify some things. Someone else invented the idea, and another someone else (Google) made it famous.
2) Netscape was made free for "individual, academic and research users" in 1994. http://home.mcom.com/info/newsrelease.html [mcom.com]
Spyglass Mosaic--you know, the browser that MSIE was based on--was free for "non-commercial use" even before that. MSIE 1.0 didn't even come out until 1995. Companies tend to pay for things, so while making a browser free for commercial use certainly helped the web some, leaving it as something companies had to pay for wouldn't have held the web back much.
I don't know if your last line is sarcastic or not, but yes, there is tons of evidence that Microsoft did indeed work very hard to hold back the web. That doesn't mean they never did anything that was pro-web but what little they did was more than offset by all the bad they've done.
Re:Microsoft Deserves It (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a link for you. Is "microsoft.com" a good enough source? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx [microsoft.com]
"Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. This article describes different levels of Web browser support [emphasis mine], browser compatibility for published sites, and how ActiveX controls affect features... SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. However, certain Web browsers might cause some SharePoint Server 2010 functionality to be downgraded, limited, or available only through alternative steps."
There's more to the world than just IE and Firefox on Windows. I work in a large publishing company (1,000s of employees) and we're close to 50% Mac overall. (And it's about 90% in design, production, etc.--you know, the departments that actually make what the company sells.) There is a LOT of key stuff in SP that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, on a Mac.
And in other news, here's how MS thinks Wiki software (and HTML in general) should work.
http://imgur.com/IaHTb [imgur.com]
1) The whole point of Wikis is that you can edit them WITHOUT knowing HTML -- just use *, #, etc.
2) <strong> and <b> tags?!?!? <font> tags in 2012? Makes me want to shoot myself in the back of the head... twice.
Re:There is a huge positive bias (Score:2, Informative)
Embrace. Apple built itself back up by leaning hard on the F/OSS community.
Extend. Apple polished the user experience. They made it shiny.
Extinguish. Apple runs an entirely closed ecosystem. Also, the app store terms and conditions are incompatible with the L/GPL.
Need I say more?
Price fixing maybe? (to be determined, but smells bad)