As they say, they contracted a independent contractor for the work, who probably couldn't handle the task well and took too many code samples from Plurk's source code
Well the competitor's site was banned from China. And what was the last time you visited plurk.com. The UI is not that unique and nobody in MS would have seen Plurk's code to realize it was a rip-off.
When you contract a third party vendor you give them a lot of trust including access to your resources and code. They sign on the dotted line saying they would follow Microsoft's policy for the same which is pretty strict and doesn't even allow the devs to look at 3rd party code.
Whether I, an English speaker in the US, has visited plurk is irrelevant - they are the leader in this market in Asia, apparently.
Whether it was 'unique' or not, the UI delivered was nearly identical to Plurk's and was obviously a copy.
The idea that MS is not responsible because a third party created this is absurd; a company is responsible for what you purchase and release under their own name. Whomever was responsible for commissioning , accepting or supervising this project obviously should have been aware of existing sites. Clearly, someone failed in a supervisory role here.
You've got to know where the review takes place as well. I'd be fairly confident it remained in China and not the U.S., and this is just another example of what may happen when doing business in China. I know that the cool thing to do is vilify Microsoft, but I think they are part victim here. Now that corporate is aware of the issue, they are working to resolve it. Plurk should be happy for the publicity they received out of this (I'm sure they were high-fiving around the office when it was discovered).
Apparently, the cool thing to do is now to defend Microsoft, actually, even in the face of ridiculous transgressions and clear unlawful and unethical behavior. I can't believe that people are giving them a pass on this 'oh, a 3rd party developer did everything and it was all their fault!' excuse. Somehow I doubt that Plurk was elated to find that a giant corporation had thoroughly imitated their site. Probably, once they saw that the exact code had been lifted,it was a relief, though, as they knew that couldn't stand.
You've probably not heard of Orkut, but if you are Brazilian you have. While I was in college chatting with my friends on AIM or ICQ, a lot of the non-US work was moving from ICQ to MSN.
Lots of things can end up being popular on a mostly regional basis. I'm sure there are many sites that are only popular to a specific locale that you've never heard of.
A good example is MSN vs. AIM in Canada. vs. the USA. I lived very close to the border for a while, and it's pretty amazing how you can drive 20 minutes in either direction, and the market share for the two services would practically trade places.
While that's certainly true, is it possible for someone who is overseeing a contractor to recognize the look and feel of every single competitor?
As an example, do you think it would have seen the light of day if Twitter, not Plurk, was involved?
Whenever something like this happens, it's a sign that the people who could have stopped it were completely unaware of what was happening. I'm sure the final work product was reviewed and approved by one or more people, who likely don't live in holes.
Microsoft knows better than to try something like this deliberately. They're big enough and do enough that something like this was bound to happen eventually. I think they handled it well, and may be more circumspect going forward.
