Microsoft should be held accountable for this, but assuming the blog is correct, I'm assuming that the deliberate ripoff (described on plurk's blog) wasn't a high-level Redmond decision.It was probably a decision taken at the junior management levelin Microsoft, China.
It will be interesting to see Microsoft's response, but suspending the MSN club service is probably the best immediate response, if plurk's blog is correct.
Precisely. This was a junior dev somewhere far away from Redmond making a terrible mistake. It's about to get thrown up to the highest level, and I can pretty much guarantee you that MSFT takes the site down.
It wasn't even that. It was a third party contractor hired by the Chinese company Microsoft partnered with to create "MSN China". So this was beyond just a hierarchical separation within the company, it was several degrees separated from the company itself. Only through contract is this even owned by Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see Microsoft's response, but suspending the MSN club service is probably the best immediate response, if plurk's blog is correct.