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Microsoft rips off Plurk

blog.plurk.com

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121–130 of 141 posts

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#121

Post by gommm »

ericb wrote: post #21
axod wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "their culture' do you mean China, or Microsoft? I really don't think for example Google China would do this.

China has some odd laws in terms of how Chinese subsidiaries work from what I understand. It is isn't quite like opening a subsidiary in say, England. I think there is a rule about a local chinese partner company being involved where you get your employees through that chinese partner company. In the example I witnessed, it was difficult to dictate culture in the chinese office as they were working through an interme…

There are two kinds of subsidiary in China for foreign companies: - Representation Office - WFOE: Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise

In the case of a representation office, employees are hired through a Human Ressource company (eg: FESCO) but not in the case of WFOE (which requires quite a bit more capital to open though: around 45 000$ minimum invested over a period of 2 years in Shanghai) I'm just starting here, so I'm not exactly sure yet of the limitation of FESCO contracts in term of how much of the culture you can dictate in the chinese office...

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#123

Post by asmosoinio »

vitobcn wrote: post #119

At this point, Microsoft issued a press release and took the site down while investigating. PR: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-14Sta...

Wov, that was fast! This seems like a positive thing for Plurk, let's see how it plays out in the end.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#124

Post by furyg3 »

dangrossman wrote: post #110
julio_the_squid wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't seem to have a problem with going quite public with it.

It's hard to say that about a company with 130,000 employees and consultants. I highly doubt anyone near the VP level at Microsoft has any idea that some team in China did this.

Yes, but just because everyone at the company didn't decide to do this in unison, doesn't mean that the "company" isn't 100% completely responsible for it.

If the "VP level" at MS doesn't have enough control to prevent an entire department in China from ripping off a popular site and going live with it... then damn. I see no difference between that and Ballmer himself copying and pasting the code.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#125

Post by riobard »

potatolicious wrote: post #43
mikeryan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I can lay all the blame on Microsoft for this. The dev's knew what they were doing but I doubt the rip-off percolated very high up. As a SW manager I'm not sure how I'd know that this was ripped off wholesale if I wasn't very familiar with the ripped off site. Don't get me wrong, this is bad. But expose it to MS and let them clean house. I don't doubt that they will.

> if I wasn't very familiar with the ripped off site. Considering the ripped off site is a chief competitor of this software, I suspect the rip-off was aware at least by mid-level managers. Well, either they were aware of the rip-off, or they were wildly incompetent to the point where they didn't even know their chief competitor's site.

Plurk is blocked by the Great Firewall in mainland China, so the guys at MS China have a good excuse insisting they did not know it before, though I would guess they have VPN to get over with the firewall ...

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#126

Post by geedee77 »

Whilst this really does suck, I think it's valid to mention here that Microsoft have now said that the coding was 'done' by a 3rd party developer so all the comments that MS have done this are no longer valid.

Having said that though, someones head should roll at MS for not checking this out properly before go-live and I'm pretty certain MS themselves are ultra embarrassed and will try to solve this as soon as possible.

I hope that the Plurk guys get something worthwhile out of this ... maybe even more than the copious amounts of free advertising they're currently seeing.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#127

Post by jarsj »

vitobcn wrote: post #119

At this point, Microsoft issued a press release and took the site down while investigating. PR: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-14Sta...

That's nice. MSFT should take action against the vendor and come clean out of this.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#128

Post by gcb »

robryan wrote: post #72
abossy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel sounds like he's replacing Don Dodge.

Sounds like a better role though, not necessarily pushing Microsoft products.

two months from here he will realise that the VPs expect him to know from startups why they aren't using IIS.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#129

Post by gcb »

qeorge wrote: post #47
amix wrote: post #5

Being the co-founder and lead dev of Plurk I can tell you this sucks :-( But we are looking at our legal options, thought legal war with Microsoft and especially legal war at Microsoft in China would require a lot of resources. I think this will become a major concern for all startups that are doing lots of client-side stuff. If people have determination they can copy your code (even if all your code is obfuscated, w…

They can't steal what's really valuable about Plurk: 1) Your loyal community 2) The team that created this site in the first place All they got was a snapshot of what you were doing yesterday.

is 1 valid in China already?

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#130

Post by jrnkntl »

vitobcn wrote: post #119

At this point, Microsoft issued a press release and took the site down while investigating. PR: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-14Sta...

Basically they just subcontracted the whole MSN Juku thing and nobody at MS ever had a real look into it or didn't know about Plurk?
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