The Weekly "Screw Google" Meeting? It's Between the "F@%! Linux" Luncheon and the "Ream Apple" Social.

August 28, 2009 at 1:19 pm PT

Get this: Microsoft has been holding secret “Screw Google” meetings in Washington where it schemes to undermine Google and prevent the company from subsuming the businesses that took it decades to build. “Microsoft is at the center of a group of companies who see Google as a threat to them in some combination of business and policy,” a source familiar with the matter told DailyFinance. “The effort is designed to make Google look like the big high-tech bad guy here.”

Those ruthless, conniving bastards. Strategizing to thwart a rival.

I’m sure nothing of this sort goes on over at Google (GOOG), where everything is altruism and Segways and don’t-be-evil happy rainbows. Surely, the lobbyists Google employs are working exclusively to advance the company’s mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. They’d never do anything untoward like conspire to protect Google’s interests from a competitor. They’d never, for example, draft an antitrust complaint to the Justice Department that forced Microsoft (MSFT) to make changes to its new Vista operating system.

Please. This is business is usual. And if Google’s lobbyists aren’t holding a weekly “Screw Microsoft” meeting or some variation on that, then Google should get some new lobbyists.

Tagged with: altruism, antitrust, business, competitor, complaint, digital, GOOG, Google, John Paczkowski, Justice Department, lobbyist, meeting, Microsoft, MSFT, operating system, policy, Screw Google, Segway, Vista, Washington

comments so far. Add yours.

Fred Hamranhansenhansen

> Those ruthless, conniving
> bastards. Strategizing to
> thwart a rival.

I think the reason this is news is because Microsoft doesn’t compete, they anti-compete. They are famous for it, and they’ve been convicted of it.

So they aren’t sitting there at their Screw Google meeting saying “let’s make a free version of Windows with just an HTML 5 browser so that Chrome OS doesn’t get any traction in the market,” they’re saying, “how can we improve our anti-competitive deals with PC makers so that it’s even harder if not impossible for them to ship Chrome OS systems?”

> Please. This is business
> is usual.

It’s probably Microsoft business as usual, but not business as usual.

I mean, even the name of the meeting, “Screw Google” just fits their juvenile attitude. They have never had to compete because they were essentially given the DOS monopoly and they illegally turned that into a Windows monopoly. So when they get together to “strategize to thwart a rival” they write “Screw Google” on a whiteboard and figure out how they can put sugar in the Google gas tank.

They should be writing “Save Microsoft” on the whiteboard and working that topic through for a while.