"I'm the most honest man I know!" the compulsive liar said:

ZDNet reports Microsoft's Bill Gates as saying "For Microsoft, we always want to be in the lead, making the breakthroughs," in a recent interview, this from a company that hasn't had a notable breakthrough in anything other than "salesmanship" since its beginnings. You'll remember that Microsoft didn't invent the concept of "windows"; it didn't invent its own office software; it didn't invent the media player; it certainly did not invent the web browser. In fact you would be hard pressed to discover anything it made any sort of breakthroughs at all, other than creating the largest pile of gold any dragon could ever want to sit on.

The interesting paragraph from the news report by ZDNet follows:

With its annual MSN Strategic Account Summit, which runs through Thursday, Microsoft is both trying to hone its pitch to advertisers as well as reassure its investors, who have pushed Microsoft shares significantly lower since Microsoft announced plans last week to invest roughly $2 billion more than expected in its new businesses, largely MSN and Windows Live.

There's the problem: share prices are down. Oops! Microsoft has a history of money losing adventures. Their operating system and office program, traditionally, have been their sole money makers. Whenever they've strayed into other areas, they've taken a financial bath. The capitalist gamblers are hedging their bets that Gates and company are going out on another limb with a saw in hand.

And Microsoft just can't stand the notion that Google is making all of that money we've heard about recently. Dragons do be jealous folk, especially of other dragons.

More on the Plagiarism Issue: The Buck Blinds All

More so called plagiarized passages have been discovered in the Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, novel, taken from yet a second author's work. Everybody seems to be wringing hands over this, but little is being made of the real culprit: the publisher.

Miss Viswanathan is a young writer, doing what all young writers do, emulating the writing she admires. This is how writers generally start out being writers. The passages that have been brought to attention as examples of plagiarized work vacillate between copying and paraphrasing. In an acedemic context both require citing the original author's work.

Beginning writers do this sort of thing on their way to discovering their own voices. Good publishers recognize this and they don't publish such work. Porn publishers and other pulp publishers have never worried about this sort of activity any more than TV executives trying to immitate hit TV shows have.

So what we are seeing in the "chic-lit" genre is similar opportunism by publishers who recognize that their customers just want more of the same, kind of like being thrilled that there is a MacDonalds or Wal-Mart or Starbucks in every town.

We love being unique individuals just like everyone else.

The real culprit here is the publisher who is in a mad corporate rush to make sure next quarter's bottom line is at least slightly better than last quarter's. No one in this particular instance is interested in anything other than a fast buck.