By: Nik Cubrilovic Weblog » Blog Archive » Microsoft and Claria deal rumours: The postmortem

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 03:19:39 +0000

[...] At the time SiliconBeat looked into it further but could not establish any truth and they left it at that. Two weeks later on the 30th of June CNet republished the rumour and attached some expert opinion on the move from an analyst at Forrester research: “Like AOL buying Advertising.com (last year), MSN can use Claria to extend its existing advertising relationships,” said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. The story was not that bad, as they made it clear that both parties were not commenting on the deal. Microsoft and Claria were not denying the rumours outright so CNet considered it news. From there the NYTimes picked up the story, and at this point the $500 Million valuation figure was attached to the rumour (the story is in the archives now), but it was still clear that the deal was a rumour. Slashdot ran the news with a link to the NYTimes article the next day, and they also quoted the $500 Million valuation figure from the NYTimes story. Slashdot also added that the deal had been in the works for two weeks, ie. from the time the SiliconBeat story first ran: “For the last two weeks, Microsoft has been in talks to buy Claria, an adware marketer formerly called Gator, and best known for its pop-up ads and software that tracks people visiting Web sites. The offer price on the table as recently as Wednesday was $500 million. The Slashdot thread went into a frenzy with speculation and criticism. From there I posted this entry in trying to quell the crap and work out why they might be considering such a move (I still believe that internally, Microsoft might have been considering it, but for the reasons I outlined in my post, not what everybody else thinks.). My own post attracted a small crowd of readers and at the time was one of a few non-critical blog entries about the rumours. On the back of major news sites and Slashdot running the story, Siliconbeat wrote again about the this post. Siliconbeat cited their previous post from 2 weeks prior, saying again that they could not confirm the rumour. They went on to track which major sites were reporting the story. The next day, a side story from the Microsoft and Claria deal rumours emerged, with many blogs reporting that Microsoft’s anti-spyware (MAS) product was now not detecting Claria spyware, and in the cases it was, by default it was asking the user to ignore it. Ben Edelman, an anti-spyware campaigner added a footnote to his previous post outlining his concerns on the Microsoft-Claria deal, citing what SpywareWarrior had found about MAS now allegedly ignoring Claria spyware: This is exactly the kind of conflict of interest I worried about three paragraphs above — but I didn’t anticipate how quickly this problem would come into effect. This seems to be the first point where the Microsoft Claria deal, and MAS ignoring Claria, were linked. His comments were about 5 or 6 links away from the follow-up Slashdot post which said: A week after word leaked out that Microsoft was negotiating an acquisition deal with Claria (See recent /. coverage), spyware researchers have noticed that the Windows antispyware application has downgraded Claria’s Gator detections and changed the recommended action from ‘quarantine’ to ‘ignore.’ Not a bad story, a great conspiracy theory. Only one problem, Microsoft had altered the Claria reporting in MAS in May of this year, and as part of altering other ratings on spyware - long before the first story about a Microsoft deal with Claria broke. Microsoft claims that Claria had first approached them in January, asking that Microsoft re-consider how MAS was reporting Claria software. There might be two reasons to justify this. The first being that Microsoft wanted to avoid a lawsuit. The second would be that Claria could claim that MAS was destroying its software, which it sees as having a legitimate purpose (software such as Smiley’s). After all, the user agreed to the terms of installing the software, spyware or no spyware, right? (Claria are still assholes regardless). A number of sources then continued to combine the two stories in a mass frenzy. The author of the original post about MAS ignoring Claria looked into how MAS was handling Claria after the first stories about a potential deal had broke. So he was obviously looking at it with the intention of finding some dirt, and that he did, but got his dates wrong. The conclusions attached to the original “MAS ignoring Claria” story was that Claria software not being removed by default by Microsoft was a result of what everybody though to believe was a pending deal between the two parties. If the original sources of the “MAS ignores Claria” story had dug deeper, they would have found that the updates happen long before the potential buy-out story. This put Microsoft in a position such that if they left MAS to remove Claria software, they would likely face a lawsuit, and by changing it to ignore, they set off outraged opinions. A lose-lose situation for Microsoft. Now the realisation is slowly creeping out that not only did the original story about the buy-out deal have no credible sources, but that the story about MAS ignoring Claria was not complete (while it was true that MAS was not removing Claria by default anymore). This has resulted in a small number of updates and corrections from some sources. But the damage had been done, thousands of blogs had linked to and published the conspiracy theory that Microsoft no longer considered Claria spyware because they were about to purchase the company. As the story crawled through blogs and other news sources, additional bits were added to it and the story mutated like a game of Chinese whispers in a demonstration of apparent pure hate for Microsoft and Claria. The blog network is now so complex, that even after such stories get out it is very hard to track down original sources, with each link in the chain diluting the story to some extent and masking the original sources. Bloggers must stick to a principal that original sources of material are linked to and outlined, otherwise stories such as this will continue to be mis-represented. And again, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. [...]

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By: Nik Cubrilovic Weblog » Blog Archive » Microsoft and Claria deal rumours: The postmortem