You need to read Groklaw's report of Microsoft's Iowa case. As so many have suspected, nothing ever changed at Microsoft; they still act as they always have. Perhaps the only difference is that they have learned the value of destroying evidence:
Valentine's order requires employees to get rid of all E-mail after 30 days no matter where it is. And it is unequivocal. Mr. Allchin, who is group Vice President, Platforms Product Group, approves of Mr. Valentine's order and sends another follow-up E-mail on January 23, 2000. This is Plaintiffs' Exhibit also 6704. He says, "being even more hard core, this is not something you get to decide. This is company policy. Do not think this is something that only applies to a few people. Do not think it will be okay if I do this, it hasn't caused any problems so far. Do not archive your mail. Do not be foolish. 30 days."
Arrgh.. Haven't we had enough? If there were any real justice in this world, Microsoft would have been torn apart years ago and their executives would have been fined or even jailed. Extreme? No, not really: their predatory business practices have stolen billions from consumers - why is that any different than what Enron did? Sure, the methods were different, but the results are the same.
This case also promises more details of how Microsoft uses low or give-away pricing when threatened by Linux. No big surprise there: is there really anyone so stupid as to not see this? Well, apparently so..
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Mon Dec 11 13:03:33 2006: drag
How the hell are you suppose to operate when your not allowed to keep email more then 30 days old?
I always keep old mail, unless it's junk mail. Once I get enough I dump it out of my email client and save it and there have been more then a few times were I've ended up grepping through it to find this or that thing.
Especially working in a technical place like Microsoft I would expect that people would like to save at least a minority mail for future reference as some technical tidbit for future reference or book to read or something like that. Some sort of software design decision or lets-get-together-and-talk-about-this sort of thing.
I could imagine some poor guy getting a review after a admin had looked at the mail server and noticed how much mail he was keeping up there..
angry supervisor: "Didn't you get the memo that said that you were not to keep mail older then 30 days?"
poor bastard: "Oh, I guess that is why I have no mail before 2000.. I must of forgot about it after I deleted the email reminding us to delete the email. *sigh*"
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