More about Microsoft: Was the fix in?


John Aravosis, who broke the news on Microsoft's abandonment of gays and lesbians this week, also posted an angry open letter to Microsoft on AMERICAblog.

You can read the original here.

This is an excerpt, which made me realize something that hasn't been part of the discourse up to this point:
Changing the subject, we understand congratulations is in order. You're planning a 2.2 million square foot expansion of the Microsoft campus in Redmond over the next ten to twenty years. The expansion, we hear, would allow you to hire 10,000 to 20,000 new employees.

Well bully for you. You must be quite excited about that.

We also hear that you're going to need a lot of help - a LOT of help - from the state legislature and the Redmond city council to actually make that expansion work, for highway and road improvements and the like, and that not everybody is real happy about it.

Well, wouldn't it be funny if some really smart faggots decided to use their political expertise to kill any possibility of you getting the legislation and city council approval you need to make that expansion happen? And wouldn't it be even funnier if those same faggots went to your competitors and asked them to finance the entire campaign to kill your expansion? [The letter starts out, "Dear Microsoft, You messed with the wrong faggots." Aravosis, for those of you just joining the blogosphere, is outspokenly gay.]


Reading this section of John's letter, I realized that the expansion project could have been the point.

It never seemed right that Microsoft, which has been decorated by LGBT organizations for its support of gay rights in the workplace and in society at large, would have reversed itself because of hassling by one ornery preacher -- if that were how it worked, and individuals had that much power over the corporate giant, Bill would have fixed the security holes in Windows a long time ago.

What if the conservative preacher was a red herring, and instead, Microsoft bargained away its support for the gay rights bill in exchange for the future support of key Senators for the expansion project?

The bargaining could have occurred either actively on Microsoft's part (e.g., Microsoft approaches socially conservative opponents of the expansion and offers them a trade) or less voluntarily (i.e., social conservatives approach Microsoft and make them an offer they can't refuse, threatening opposition of the expansion project unless Microsoft pulls support for gay rights legislation).

Doesn't that make more sense than the "ornery preacher" theory?

If this is the case, there's an unfortunate corollary: If the votes are already bought and paid for, John's plan to threaten Microsoft by mounting a political challenge to the campus expansion may be a more uphill battle than we expect.

Posted: Thu - April 21, 2005 at 07:21 PM   | Category:     |   |   | |


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