With a public apology, Microsoft does the right thing by Plurk
Microsoft has admitted that its Chinese micro-blogging service Juku ripped-off code from rival Plurk. It has apologized and suspended access to the Juku beta “indefinitely.”
Here is the full press release released by Microsoft today.
REDMOND, Wash. – Dec. 15, 2009 – On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.
The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.
When we hire an outside company to do development work, our practice is to include strong language in our contract that clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe the intellectual property rights of others. We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done.
We will be suspending access to the Juku beta indefinitely.
We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.
In the wake of this incident, Microsoft and our MSN China joint venture will be taking a look at our practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors.
While it is unfortunate that the Plurk’s code and UI were lifted to begin with, Microsoft has done the right thing in this case. It acted quickly — apologizing and suspending the service the day after Plurk published its complaint against Juku on its blog. Ironically, Plurk may have benefited from all the publicity. Had it been anyone other than Microsoft who transgressed, the world would have acted with a yawn.
But given how hard Microsoft is battling to protect its own intellectual property in China, and the fact that Microsoft is one of those companies that people love to hate, Plurk’s dilemma spread across news sites, blogs and Twitter like wildfire. Many a person who had never heard of Plurk until yesterday is now aware of it. So while I bow my head to the fact that there are more positive ways to make headlines, this is one big PR win for Plurk and a minor smirch on the face for Redmond.
Like this post? Check out these others.
Plus, visit the Microsoft Subnet web site for more news, blogs, podcasts. Subscribe to all Microsoft Subnet bloggers. Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.)
- Watch out Microsoft: GNOME is poised to have a killer 2010
- Microsoft Exchange/Outlook 2010 UC Mobile and Voicemail Features (Beta) Release!
- Windows 7 Remote Admin Tools: Controls Windows Server 2008 from your Windows 7 desktop
- Fake Microsoft security e-mail spreads malicious code
- Prevx apologizes, backtracks on claims that Microsoft patch causes black screen
- Secrets of Exchange Server 2010
- Unified Messaging (Voicemail) in Exchange 2010
- Microsoft’s data cache technology, code-named Velocity, speeds app performance
Follow All Microsoft Subnet bloggers on Twitter
Follow Julie Bort on Twitter
