That's a remarkably simple, upfront and honest apology. I'm not normally a big Microsoft fan, but it sounds like they're handling this one well. Go them!
I doubt they would have been this quick or this forthright had it been an internal job.
They can't help it. It's their corporate DNA.
I have a great deal of respect for many of their technical folks, but it's been ages since the MBAs and marketroids took control of the company. (sadly I miss the Tolkien quote I was trying to put in here about evil races... It's too early in the morning)
Also, The whole thing would have gone through a whole design process involving a PM and a Test, I doubt the 3 would have come to the same design decision (visual + architectural) as Plurk. Also, if the three decided to steal the code than it would have been three people risking their jobs instead of a vendor who was hoping "nobody would notice" esp since Plurk wasn't available from China.
They would copy Plurk, but they would copy 2009's Plurk with a product that would enter beta in 2012...
"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."
That would have been a lot harder if it had been a Microsoft team.
On even-numbered days people accuse companies like Microsoft of not having enough meetings and safeguards. How could they green-light some contractor's code without triple-checking it against all the potential competitors on the web? Maybe consulting an IP lawyer. Maybe hold up the release of the code for three or four months, just to be sure. Get the CEO to sign off on it.
The moral is: Microsoft is sometimes good, and Microsoft is sometimes bad, but Microsoft will always be criticized.
In this case it looks to me like they did the right thing. They hired a contractor. They gave the contractor the power to get things done without constant handholding. In return, they made the contractor pledge in writing to uphold certain standards. Now the contract has been violated, and Microsoft took immediate action, and this press release is part of the result. It looks so innocent, but what it says is this:
These contractors have failed us for the last time. Now witness the awesome destructive power of our legal team.
You can't go through life constantly triple-checking everything. That's what contracts and insurance are for.
There's a Chinese idiom for organizations like Microsoft: "The Big Tree Catches The Wind." Because of their size and history, the company gets called on things that smaller companies never do.
And yes, kudos to them for farming out the job to someone else, and giving the contractor to do work without constant handholding.
But shame on them for not catching this blatant ripoff of a well-known competitor before launching this to the PRC market. The Plurk clone is not something the legal team should have triple-checked. It's something the China microblog product manager should have spotted on when mockups and specs were passed around.
Judging by the gushing applause for their apology, we were all half-expecting them to sue Plurk for libel, possibly having the devs shipped to Guantanamo for questioning. It feels a bit like the nervous, giggling thanks the schoolyard bully gets when he abstains, today, from stepping on the scrawny kid's glasses.
It seems as if they are only saying they will be suspending the beta of this application and re-evaluating their practices towards application code supplied by third-party vendors.
Anyway, props for the straight-up mea culpa.