Microsoft Gets Help From Both Sides of the Aisle on Lobbying

The report was prepared by the committee’s Democratic staff but couldn’t have been released without the Republican leadership’s consent, according to a Finance Committee staffer who said the document has been referred to officials at the Justice and Treasury departments.

ATR spokesman John Kartch said Norquist worked as a consultant to Microsoft for two years in the mid-1990s, “offering strategic advice on working in Washington.” The e-mails included in the report “refer to his work with Microsoft back then,” Kartch said.

Ginny Terzano, a Microsoft spokeswoman, said the e-mails “are exchanges that took place 10 years ago” and are “very unrelated” to the ODF issue in Massachusetts. She wouldn’t comment on whether Microsoft provided funding to ATR last year but said the company currently isn’t a sponsor of the group and “did not specifically work with” ATR on ODF-related lobbying.

In Massachusetts, Sun and IBM also did their fair share of lobbying in an attempt to make sure that the state’s IT division had no cause to waver from its ODF policy.

Sean Curran, a lobbyist at Waterville Consulting LLC, which has offices in Boston and in Albany, N.Y., received $60,000 in fees from Sun last year, according to Massachusetts state records. On March 11 of this year, Curran sent out an e-mail update on the activities of Microsoft and other opponents of the state’s ODF policy who were supporting the proposed amendment to take away much of the IT division’s decision-making authority.

“We will be fighting this until the amendment is dead,” Curran wrote to Doug Johnson, a program manager in Sun’s corporate standards group, and to Gutierrez.

What do you think of Microsoft's lobbying efforts in Massachusetts, related to the commonwealth's adoption of the Open Document Format for Office Applications? Share your thoughts on the Sound Off blog

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