“It could be argued that Microsoft’s unethical Technology Evangelism (TE) practices are “old news”—i.e., that Microsoft stopped using these questionable TE practices long ago. This is very unlikely to be the case, for at least three reasons.”

– James Plamondon, former Microsoft shill (aka ‘Technology Evangelist’)

Summary: Microsoft shill Jonathan Wong travels the Web to defend Microsoft

W E RARELY bother to check who is leaving comments in Boycott Novell, but moments ago someone left a comment to police the image of Bing. It took him only a couple of hours to find the post. A quick glance at his blog shows that the about page says absolutely nothing about his job at Microsoft, but a little more sniffing reveals the “evangelist” tag (the blog is all about Microsoft, which is the top tag). Looking deeper inside the posts, we find only this one post from 2008 where Wong writes: “And since Monday, I have started a new and exciting role with Microsoft as part of their Developer and Platform Evangelism Team in Singapore.”

“Neither the blog nor the E-mail address (or even the comments) say anything about his job at Microsoft.”Nice disclosure there, eh?

Neither the blog nor the E-mail address (or even the comments) say anything about his job at Microsoft. In fact, he leaves comments with a GMail address and one common theme among Microsoft “TEs” is that “Google is evil” (Jonathan Wong’s blog shows it too, explicitly). Look at the blog. Look at what he does around the Web (e.g. regarding “Bing” alone). That’s his job as a Microsoft "TE" (another term for AstroTurfers, whose roles are borderline criminal). We wrote about one colleague of his last month because they are policing individual FOSS people and even FOSS companies in that one particular case. Wong calls all this “social media marketing”, but we call it AstroTurfing and there are laws against it.

No wonder people who negatively review Vista 7 get attacked so viciously [1, 2, 3]. They are probably being stalked because they cover particular products to which Microsoft assigns “perception management” [1, 2]. █

“Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of the computer industry.”

– Microsoft, internal document [PDF]

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