Educating Coursey

Groklaw calmly takes on David Coursey's last fatuous opinion piece with points from the Massachusetts ETRM 3.5 policy FAQ. Leaving no intentional error unaddressed, Groklaw highlights the most telling evidence that David Coursey is being compensated under the table by Microsoft:

Finally, Coursey states something rather odd, and it's precisely here that Microsoft's  train runs off the rails:

[Coursey:] Microsoft is here, and as the overwhelming choice of customers, it gets to make certain decisions, file formats being one of them

First, the thing about being a monopoly is that people lack a choice, so it's a stretch to say people have chosen it. Try to buy a computer without Microsoft's operating system. Second, Microsoft doesn't get to tell governments what file formats to use. Coursey asks on what authority Quinn chose a file format for government use in executive agencies. There is statutory authority for that, actually, as the FAQ showed. But Microsoft has no such authority, and it's extraordinary that anyone would suggest that one of the perks of being a monopolist is that you get to tell governments what to do and what file formats to use. Has Microsoft forgotten who works for whom?

I want to affirm that such an opinion expressed by David Coursey here is impossible -- either to hold or to advance -- because it is too flagrantly stupid & self-contradictory. It cannot be possible for an individual -- particularly a tech journalist who reads the news day to day, who was ostensibly educated in the United States -- to believe that a company gets to decide something as fundamental as the file format for a government. Or that dominance comes first and proprietary file formats second.

To pretend to believe this is the height of corruption, and I would not pretend to slander David Coursey without good evidence that he is corrupt. It is one thing to be paid for opinions: there are whole industries for that -- of which mine (Advisory) is a part. It is another to be paid for opinions that couldn't possibly be true, that the opinion-sayer does not himself believe, and which do real harm to the ecomomy and to individuals the world over. (This I declare the very week that Bill & Melinda Gates are featured on the cover of Time Magazine, which is the most interesting contrast I have honestly seen in recent days or ranking with the best ever in my lifetime. Not unlike the photograph of the "Whites Only" sign over the WC at a Ku Klux Klan meeting hall.)

David Coursey is a garden-variety Microsoft Astroturfer, aspiring but inadequate to the mold of Jack Abramoff. Coursey is the lowest life-form in Microsoft's custom-built, made-to-order disinformation food chain. 

See my comment on more funded opinions from the Smug Pundit.