I can picture the meeting now: Microsoft executives were pounding on the table, trying to compete with Google’s primary business, web search. Engineers demonstrated algorithms and explained flow charts, but the suits were displeased. They wanted results now. Better searching techniques didn’t matter, what was important was knocking Google off its perch.
So Microsoft cheated.
The article here explains how the process worked.
The technies at Google uncovered some unique searches, things that would only happen on Google. Then they remarked how similar searches on Microsoft’s search engine Bing produced the same results. If Microsoft weren’t just copying Google’s results, then Bing would have come up with its own unique results. It didn’t.
Cheating is nothing new, of course. When you don’t know something, it’s easier to lift someone else’s work and either claim it as your own (plagiarizing) or simply submit the work and hope you don’t get caught. In fact, I’d argue that most cheaters simply want to pass the class, not really understand the material.
Microsoft obviously doesn’t understand the material.
Not only that, Microsoft has a history of cheating when it comes to competing in the computer industry.
Back in the early 1990s, memory management software was very popular. The operating system of the day, DOS, was limited to using only 640K of RAM on machines that had up to 4MB of memory.
Memory management software was big business and, obviously, Microsoft wanted a chunk of that pie. Their solution was DOS 5, which included memory management built-in.
I was a DOS 5 beta tester. As such, I enjoyed looking at the operating system’s raw code. I’d heard a rumor that Microsoft was out to get QEMM, the premier memory management software of the time. Sure enough, inside the code for DOS 5, there was instructions that looked for the QEMM driver in memory and, if found, the driver was disabled.
Naturally, I made my discovery public, sending the information off to INFOworld magazine, which published my findings. Microsoft denied it, of course. Then they explained that there had to be special handlers for QEMM. Then the code disappeared with the next release of the DOS 5 beta.
It was quite the scandal.
In fact, I remember the Microsoft PR lady calling me and asking me if there was anything Microsoft could do for me, or anything I needed. I politely told her “No,” and she never called me again.
The bottom line is that Microsoft is apparently prone to cheating. It’s nothing new. I’m sure that there are lots of bright engineers and people with good ideas at Microsoft. Let’s hope that they don’t all get frustrated and thwarted by management. Until then, well, Microsoft is apparently doing nothing to improve it’s shoddy reputation.
“I was a DOS 5 beta tester. As such, I enjoyed looking at the operating system’s raw code.”
…any chance you still have the source code? 😀
Comment by linuxlove — February 4, 2011 @ 5:55 am
There’s a difference between raw code and source code. I simply looked at the boot loader using a hex editor. The very first page showed the name of the QEMM driver sitting there as plain text. I didn’t decompile the code, but found in curious that the operating system would specifically reference the most popular memory manager directly.
Comment by admin — February 4, 2011 @ 6:35 am
Ah, I see.
It seems that Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 3.1: The early betas of the software had a little bit of code which would prevent it running on DR DOS, but ran fine on MS or IBM/PC DOS.
Comment by linuxlove — February 4, 2011 @ 6:46 am
And there was a trick you could use in DR DOS that would allow Windows to run. I recall Microsoft saying it was a security measure or some such nonsense.
Comment by admin — February 4, 2011 @ 6:51 am
I think that this is incredible lazy. Microsoft has more experience and resources at it’s disposal than almost any other company on earth, and they still copy other people’s work.
Comment by gamerguy473 — February 4, 2011 @ 6:37 pm