San Francisco — With competition between tech titans on the rise, it looks as if Redmond software maker Microsoft is running out of ideas and is now desperately adopting crooked ways on ruining their reputation by using stolen code. A popular Asian microblogging start-up “Plurk” accused Microsoft of plucking off around 80 percent of code and interface design to build a new MSN social-networking site in China.
According to reports, the software giant is suspending access to the MSN site, but it appears it is still online.
“Counterfeiting may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world. Yes, we are talking about Microsoft,” reads a blog post from Canada-based startup Plurk, which claims a membership in the “mid seven figures” concentrated primarily in Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. According to a company spokesman, it also has members in the UK, US, Australia, and Canada.
The post claimed that Microsoft’s new Chinese microblogging service, MSN Juku/Hompy/Mclub, is “overall an EXACT copy of Plurk’s” system and that 80 per cent of its code “appears to be stolen directly from Plurk.”
The post added it was “absolutely shocked infuriated when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft’s new offering had with Plurk. From the filter tabs, emoticons, qualifier/verb placement, Karma scoring system, media support, new user walk throughs to pretty much everything else that gives Plurk its trademark appeal, Microsoft China’s offering ripped off our service.’
Microsoft, late Monday reiterated that it is looking into the matter but issued a statement saying it was bringing down the Juku feature while it looks into things.
“Earlier, questions arose over a feature created by a third-party vendor for our MSN China joint venture,” Microsoft said in a statement. “Because questions have been raised about the code base comprising the service, MSN China will be suspending access to the Juku beta feature temporarily while we investigate the matter fully.”
To support the claim, the company posts screenshots of the two services — Microsoft on top, Plurk on bottom:
The above screenshot clearly demonstrates several similarities between Plurk and MSN China. But Plurk claims that the similarities extends well beyond the visual. The company says that Microsoft has taken Plurk’s custom developed libraries, css files, and client code and shamelessly ported them to its own service. “Speaking technically, what makes our claim a little stronger is that Plurk’s client side code was altered to begin with, so someone went in there and had to spend some real effort to unpack/reengineer the JS code and improve it on their end,” a Plunk spokesman said in a statement. “All internal vars have short-names like B, C, D, etc. Everything that interacts with the outside has long names, as in the minified Plurk code…”
In addition to this, there are also good similarities of code between the Microsoft and Plurk site. “We would not be going out with this story if we were not fully confident in our allegations of willful intent on their part in taking our code.”
And if the design comparisons above does not appear suspicious enough, then just take a look at the code in both Plurk and MSN Juku. These snapshots were provided by Plurk:
Microsoft stated that the investigation has been delayed by the fact that when questions were first raised it was the middle of the night in China.
“Now that the day has begun in China, our teams are working hard to track down the information,” Microsoft said.