We will close local facilities, Microsoft execs allegedly threatened when ODF was proposed as the new format for govt

May 22, 2015 09:27 GMT  ·  By

The IT reform that the United Kingdom is working on is faced with strong opposition from tech giants operating facilities and doing business in the country, with some going as far as to blackmail MPs in order to block some changes from being adopted.

David Cameron’s former strategy chief, Steve Hilton, revealed during a public speech that Microsoft officials called MPs and tried to blackmail them to block the adoption of certain laws, threatening with the closure of local research facilities if the proposed changes go through.

“You just have to fight them off. I can give you specific examples: the thing I mentioned about IT contracts. Maybe there is someone here to confirm this from Microsoft? When we proposed this, Microsoft phoned Conservative MPs with Microsoft R&D facilities in their constituencies and said, ‘we will close them down in your constituency if this goes through,’” Hilton was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

And it appears that Microsoft is not the only large tech company that turns to scare tactics to make sure that the IT reform won’t be approved in the current form.

Hilton explained that some other companies, “sometimes a global CEO,” phoned MPs with pretty much similar threats, saying that they would close down plants in the United Kingdom.

Microsoft and open standards

Microsoft has recently lost an important battle in the United Kingdom, as the government has decided to switch to the open document format (ODF) and thus make the need for commercial software, such as Microsoft Office, less critical.

It appears that, when the government proposed the open document format, Microsoft tried a similar tactic and some company officials phoned MPs to threaten with lower spending and job cuts.

“A day or two before we were going to give a speech, a couple of backbench MPs called the office - they said Microsoft had called them saying if we went ahead with the speech on open standards, open architecture and open source, they would cut spending or maybe close research and development centers in the constituencies of the MPs they had called,” former government technology adviser Rohan Silva said last year.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft refused to comment on this report, but there’s no doubt that the software giant doesn’t want to be involved in such a scandal, especially because it’s in the middle of a transformation that would improve its gentleman sense of doing business and keep its name away from this kind of accusations.