Microsoft (
MSFT), which is seemingly trying to remake itself from a software company into
a non-profit privacy advocate on par with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has
shifted the focus of its anti-
Google (
GOOG) campaign to the realm of lobbying.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is pushing a bill in the Massachusetts state legislature that “would prohibit companies that provide schools with ‘a cloud-computing’ service… from using the information gleaned from schoolchildren for advertising or other commercial purposes.” While this sounds innocuous enough, the
Journal says that it’s being crafted “to take aim at Google’s growing business of providing basic software like email and word processing over the Internet, which, in turn, is a growing threat to Microsoft’s cash-cow suite of Office tools.”
Continue reading…