News Microsoft coughs to Plurk theft

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/12/17/microsoft-coughs-to-plurk-theft/1

Microsoft has come clean regarding theft of layout and code from microblogging site Plurk for its new MSN China social networking service, blaming a contracted third party

 

Greetings!

Those disingenious third parties...

 

The coffee hasn't kicked in. I read that as Microsoft stealing the Phunk.

 

Noo! Not the phunk!

Shame on you M$. Here I was thinking you were becoming less... M$-ish, and now this. Really tho, use your own developers.

 

So who stole the Noize, then?

 

Given that Plurk is very much a, ahem, homage to Twitter, it's a delicious slice of irony.

 

You can steal the Noize but you can't fight the Phunk!

 

I read that as them also trying to steal the funk and then I thought of the boosh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1tLbFI2ffg

 

MS is not the only on to have problems with this if i remember correctly. i only wonder if this is from "off shore" contractors (like China or India), which is my suspicion. it is my experience that contractors and manufactures from certain countries play a very elaborate shell game (remember the cisco manufacturing sub contractor that "accidentally" made a whole bunch of "extra" routers out of inferior parts and passed them off as the genuine article?). i would not be surprised i the first contractor is actually related to the second in this MS case.

of course i am not trying to absolve MS, they should have vetted the code more thoroughly, or hired someone they could trust. i also think it is silly of them to hide who did it (i want to know so i can avoid them). their silence makes me think even more that it was a contractor from china, as companies here in the U.S. usually bend over backwards to say that it it not the fault of the contractor when it clearly is (remember the Matel toy incident? and the dogfood incident? yeah. . . .)

also don't think i am bashing on china (well, i kinda am), companies in the west do stupid things all the time, but they are usually severely upbraided about it and suffer a big hit to reputation. but it seems to me that somehow western companies got the idea that it is not politically correct to blame Chinese contractors. . . which is why MS silence in the matter seems suspicious to me.

anyhoo, MS: tell us who did it and wipe some of the crap off your name.

 

Shame shame shame on Micro!!!