On Saturday 19 January 2002 5:26 am, Mike Andrew wrote:
> There are a (very) small number of people on this list, who will confirm
> for you, that FUDmongery is real and was a paid for veritable disease in
> the OS/2 vs Msoft warz. The basic rules are, you take your opponent's os
> apart and find anything sloppy. You then innocently post 'bug reports' into
> mailgroups. ANY response of any kind to these bugs (real or imagined),
> prompts a wave of auto-generated hate mail from umpty dozen new
> mail@somewheres, "How can it be like this", "I thought you said it was
> 'perfect", "I agree with Fred, your OS is crap",,,,,,,,
I don't recall ever seeing a 'wave' of 'munchkins' (the name given to MS
trolls). They are usually more subtle than that. But at some point in some
forum there probably was a wave.
The one instance I was involved in went as follows:
A high up MS official frequented a certain CompuServe (CIS) (OS/2 friendly)
forum. As such he was friendly and informative and in no way a problem. He
was considered one of the 'core friends' on that forum.
But at some point he 'commissioned' either himself or another MS employee to
take one of those CIS freebie packs and open an account with CIS. He/they
then placed a call from Redmond to Witchita, KS to get on the system, thus
trying to hide themselves better. Joining the forum, he/they claimed to
work for IBM or have dealing with IBM and made some rather damaging
statements. This went on for 4 or 5 sessions under the name of Steve Barkto.
Several of the forum participants noticed a similarity of the typing and
language style usage of 'Steve' and started to investigate. Although CIS
would not reveal any details about the account, somehow it was discovered
that the credit card used to open the account belonged to the MS official.
He denied it, said a lot of people had access to that particular credit card
and a MS investigation was to take place. Nothing ever came of it but the
name 'Barkto' will probably live on forever. In fact, checking with
www.barkto.com, there is a better explaination of what really happened than I
just gave from memory. Excuse me if I missed some details.
In any event, when/if MS starts a campaign, it will probably be hard to tell.
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+ Bruce S. Marshall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bellaire, MI 01/19/02 10:47 +
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
"I've learned- that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is
at first, the passion fades, and there had better be a lot of money
to take its place."
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