/thread.
> A former colleague based in Saudi Arabia who had become upset by what he saw taking place at Microsoft began forwarding me emails and documentation—and I learned that the corruption went much deeper than I had suspected.
Great, the guy just confessed receiving the internal documents from a company sent by an accomplice.
> This decision maker on the customer side would send an email to Microsoft requesting a discount, which would be granted, but the end customer would pay the full fee anyway. The amount of the discount would then be distributed among the parties in cahoots: the Microsoft employee(s) involved in the scheme, the partner, and the decision maker at the purchasing entity—often a government official.
Yep, the most straightforward and easy way to get some additional money.
> In a 2015 meeting with members of the Nigerian Parliament, the president of the Senate complained to me that the government had paid $5.5 million for Microsoft licenses for hardware they did not possess. This should never have happened, because Microsoft’s standard practice was to meet with the National Assembly’s IT department and financial controller to check the number of computers needing licenses before submitting any proposal.
This is not MS' problem, it's the problem of some corrupt paper-pusher who managed to convince all parties what there was a need to spend $5.5M.
> Likewise, auditors discovered that Qatar’s Ministry of Education was paying $9.5 million annually over seven years for Microsoft Office and Windows licenses they weren’t using—as they didn’t even have any PCs or laptop computers
Again, this is not MS' problem.
To sum up: the guy lived in the bubble for 20 years and suddenly he understood.