Microsoft Statement Regarding MSN China Joint Venture’s Juku Feature
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
I doubt they would have been this quick or this forthright had it been an internal job.
They can't help it. It's their corporate DNA.
I have a great deal of respect for many of their technical folks, but it's been ages since the MBAs and marketroids took control of the company. (sadly I miss the Tolkien quote I was trying to put in here about evil races... It's too early in the morning)
Also, The whole thing would have gone through a whole design process involving a PM and a Test, I doubt the 3 would have come to the same design decision (visual + architectural) as Plurk. Also, if the three decided to steal the code than it would have been three people risking their jobs instead of a vendor who was hoping "nobody would notice" esp since Plurk wasn't available from China.
They would copy Plurk, but they would copy 2009's Plurk with a product that would enter beta in 2012...
"The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property."
That would have been a lot harder if it had been a Microsoft team.
On even-numbered days people accuse companies like Microsoft of not having enough meetings and safeguards. How could they green-light some contractor's code without triple-checking it against all the potential competitors on the web? Maybe consulting an IP lawyer. Maybe hold up the release of the code for three or four months, just to be sure. Get the CEO to sign off on it.
The moral is: Microsoft is sometimes good, and Microsoft is sometimes bad, but Microsoft will always be criticized.
In this case it looks to me like they did the right thing. They hired a contractor. They gave the contractor the power to get things done without constant handholding. In return, they made the contractor pledge in writing to uphold certain standards. Now the contract has been violated, and Microsoft took immediate action, and this press release is part of the result. It looks so innocent, but what it says is this:
These contractors have failed us for the last time. Now witness the awesome destructive power of our legal team.
You can't go through life constantly triple-checking everything. That's what contracts and insurance are for.
There's a Chinese idiom for organizations like Microsoft: "The Big Tree Catches The Wind." Because of their size and history, the company gets called on things that smaller companies never do.
And yes, kudos to them for farming out the job to someone else, and giving the contractor to do work without constant handholding.
But shame on them for not catching this blatant ripoff of a well-known competitor before launching this to the PRC market. The Plurk clone is not something the legal team should have triple-checked. It's something the China microblog product manager should have spotted on when mockups and specs were passed around.
It seems as if they are only saying they will be suspending the beta of this application and re-evaluating their practices towards application code supplied by third-party vendors.
Anyway, props for the straight-up mea culpa.
Judging by the gushing applause for their apology, we were all half-expecting them to sue Plurk for libel, possibly having the devs shipped to Guantanamo for questioning. It feels a bit like the nervous, giggling thanks the schoolyard bully gets when he abstains, today, from stepping on the scrawny kid's glasses.
The blatant copying (in the Plurk case) is a particularly egregious example of what can happen with too much outsourcing, but the impact of policies (that treat product development as an outsourcable commodity) over the past several years extends beyound this example and hurts overall quality.
Also, there are times when a group without development resources (e.g. a content group or an evangelism group) wants to build a tool or a website. They don't really have an option but to outsource its creation.
By "product development", I specifically meant product development and core teams at Microsoft.
On your other point, I think we can agree that penny-wise pound foolish isn't a good policy for companies like Microsoft <g>
Btw to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that all outsourcing is bad. I managed one small outsourced project in the 90s and was very happy with the results. However, imo, today's Microsoft does too much outsourcing.
So now Microsoft have no "plurk" service, why not buy the startup and integrate them into their offering? Wins all around.
Isn't Plurk banned from China? I would imagine there may be some legal wrangling with the Chinese government to get a now-purchased Plurk back onto that market.
If Microsoft made any money through the Juku service, the same should be true of there as well.
One of my earliest commercial software applications (for Palm OS) was decompiled and re-packaged as a competitor to our product by a Chinese company. When you looked at the binary of their product, it had most of our function names in it. Also, it had most of our bugs. These were weird bugs that no one implementing it on their own would've ever replicated.
We contact the company and they said that they honored our work and loved our product and didn't copy it and "yada yada happy-go-lucky" which was total BS.
Sadly since they were in China and our only real option (according to lawyers) was to sue the company in the US that sold it, which unfortunately was an online software retailer that was 30%+ of our revenues. Scratch that.
Thus we just had to deal with it.
I am not sure if it's cultural or what, but I largely avoid China as much as possible now.
Fool me once, shame on me. Don't get fooled again.
I'm not ready to heap a ton of praise on a major company just for following basic ethics and PR in the wake of a scandal they caused. Just how low of a bar are we trying to set here?
It's like if I murdered someone and then got away by saying "I apologize for the misbehavior of my murderous personality - I will not be doing business with it in the future." Doesn't work that way.
In any case, my point is that Microsoft didn't do anything especially noble by apologizing and taking the site down in the face of blatant plagiarism. If it were noble, you'd be able to name some less noble but at least as self-interested actions Microsoft could have taken. I can't think of one.
Microsoft doing practically anything besides what this would have only hurt them more.
Should MS have watched the contractor more closely? Probably. But in the end, it's reasonable to expect that if you hire someone to do work for you, that they're going to do it ethically and legally, even in China. Of course MS takes all responsibility here. That's not even in question. But put yourself in MS's shoes. Yes they are the largest software company in the world, but ignore that. Put yourself in their shoes. You hire someone to do something. That someone does it illegally and deviously, you have no choice but to completely rip out everything they did. You just got screwed.
In the end, it even looks like Plurk may benefit from all of this, there is now a lot more people out there that have heard of them.
I don't disagree with that. All I was saying is that the tremendous kudos some people are giving Microsoft for this response seem to be misplaced.
I'm sure Microsoft handles lots of outsourced projects, and they can't review every last bit of code. Why not put in a system where violations like these can be reported to someone at MS?
The Chinese government has issues with sites containing user-generated content. Neither Microsoft nor anyone else can resolve these issues just by throwing money at the problem. Getting Plurk back into China would likely involve making substantial changes to how the site is run: for example, demonstrating that they can and will take down or block posts at the request of the Chinese government within a specific amount of time after the request is made.