Heard of Windows 8? Learn all about Windows 8 and what Microsoft's plans are for the next version of Windows due in 2012. Click the Windows 8 orb above!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
(View Legal Code)
The Anatomy of a Leak: Windows 8 Documentation
Well, after quite an exciting day of Windows 8 information leaking its way out to the Internet, it appears Microsoft is officially on the war path to finding who leaked the information in the first place. As noted on Twitter by Tom Warren of Neowin, the blog of Francisco Martin — one of the first to bring some of this Windows 8 information to light — has apparently been nixed by Microsoft (his blog resided on spaces.live.com). The earliest that these slides can be traced back is to the Website win7vista.com (thanks to @tom_warren for the link).
The documents were originally XPS files converted to PDFs with the goal of removing any incriminating watermarks. Well, win7vista.com made a mistake. As “DanielRemains” — the individual who posted the leaked content — notes, “I spent many hours working on these on removing watermarks etc.” Unfortunately, he seemed to miss a slide and it has undoubtedly brought some unwanted attention to one Derek Goode from HP. Here’s the slide which shows his email address (Update: email address removed from slide by request):
Whether or not Derek Goode is the individual who leaked the slides directly, if it was a colleague who did it behind his back, or some other scenario, Microsoft is clearly on the prowl. win7vista.com wanted all the credit, so I hope they’re ready for what’s about to ensue. Don’t be surprised if many of these posts around the Internet involving this Windows 8 documentation suddenly disappear.
-Stephen Chapman
http://msftkitchen.com
Poor guy. I don’t want to be him, in this moment.
Unfortunately, he’s guilty. He should have kept the slides in a secure place. Or, if he has given these documents to someone, he should have been careful and checked that he was a trustworthy person.
I hope Microsoft and HP won’t be too tough with him, although they have all rights to pretend a reparation for the leak of trade secrets.
(Sorry for my not perfect English, I’m Italian and I’m still learning the language at university)
I wonder how soon your web site will disappear? Keep up the great work…
I’m amazed that Microsoft didn’t use it’s own Rights Management Services to protect this kind of confidential data. It works very well, but only has one design flaw. You have to use it in order for RMS to work.
Imo it’s just viral marketing, like with Apple’s IPhone4 and leak actually organised on purpose, while putting blame on some average Joe (in our case Derek Goode).
But if post disappears they’ll already be going against a dozen bullet points of “embracing enthusiasts”. Which will be hilarious.
I don’t think the e-mail adress adds anything. You don’t have to be an encryption expert to notice the arbitrary position of the “Microsodt Conf……” and the “Under MDA” lines. Their position clearly identifies the document even without the e-mail address.
Even if you Photoshp them out, their position can be tracked thru the slides (you cannot reconstruct the original content under the text). – so why even bother?
Check out http://www.linkedin.com/ppl/we.....w_pprofile
Guy sounds legit.. :p
SH*T!!!
@ vbence
What you think is what you think.
Epic Fail =))
@Whistler, I always get a good laugh out of baseless assertions such as your “Apple’s IPhone4 and leak actually organised on purpose…”
The leak nearly destroyed the “tada!” effect — the one aspect of Apple that (especially!) its greatest detractors grudgingly acknowledge as its unquestionable genius. And, of course, it’s a big part of which makes his presentations so anticipated. And there was no shortage of rumor-mongering at the time to fan the flames; the leak actually squelched lots of the pre-presentation rumors and the press was quick to say, “ho hum; as expected” afterward.
Regards this leak, the straight story is also pretty damn good: Microsoft just lost HP as a partner in its FrankenSlate fiasco, and as a prospective customer for WinMo. (I can’t imagine that HP will be so weak-willed as to continue Palm’s fatal straddling of multiple phone OS’s.) They had better show HP a damn good-looking roadmap for desk- and laptops if they don’t want the catastrophic loss of HP going Android, hardly impossible given rumors of Apple putting its iOS onto its higher-end machines and the growing momentum behind Android and Chrome.
Finally, if you think MS is trying to copy Apple’s successful marketing, it’s odd that they’d start with its most recent failure.
Anyway, it all fails the Occam’s razor test.
In case it’s not obvious, there are some legitimate reasons companies like Microsoft don’t want this stuff to leak. Part of it is the value of announcing a bunch of stuff at once (the “TaDa effect” mentioned above), but that’s not the biggest one. The biggest one is that there is a current version of Windows, Windows 7, which Microsoft wants everyone to be talking about and thinking about. It’s a huge distraction to the marketing communications team, the engineering team and others to have to put out these rumors around what are most likely very early concepts for v.next. And that’s the other point – once the information gets circulated around, it’s a lot harder to change course or cut something – even something that wasn’t really more than a potential idea – without getting criticism for “failing to deliver X” or “promising X and then not coming through”, not just from the media but from big customers who read this stuff. By definition, products are much more blue sky early on in the planning – if they’re not, you’re not doing a good job of thinking big during planning – and then tend to for the most part shed things as they come to engineering and release. There also is the old school politeness thing as well – gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.
Thank for the article.
bcdalai
OMG girls the expendables the movie will be awesome
[...] we won’t be leaking Windows 8 information any time soon, engineers within Lenovo are already hard at work optimizing our systems for Windows [...]
fax advertising and marketing expert services include conventional high definition fax hosting space.
not anyone will be fantastic along with we are all absolute to create mistakes, don’t succeed
gone your lifeless skin cellular material which might be preventing that follicles.
Thank You.
Merci mec ! Ca déchire