Microsoft Employees Love Their iPhones 366
portscan writes "There is an entertaining and telling article in the Wall Street Journal about iPhone use by Microsoft employees. Apparently, despite it being frowned upon by senior management, iPhone use is rampant among the Redmond rank and file. The head of Microsoft's mobile division tried to explain it away as employees wanting 'to better understand the competition,' although few believe this. Nowhere does the article mention attempts by the company to understand why the iPhone is more attractive to much of Microsoft's tech-savvy workforce than the company's own products."
I worked in a mobile apps company for 7 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I loves and hateses my Preciousss (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, Apple supports tethering in the iPhone, but AT&T requires them to disallow you from using it. It was a similar deal with VoIP, which was blocked over 3G until recently. It raises the question in my mind: how much of the iPhone lock-down (only allowed to install apps from the iTunes store) is caused by Apple wanting a cut of everything, and how much is caused by contractual obligations to AT&T for preventing certain kinds of apps.
Either way, obviously iPhones would be way better if Apple didn't restrict development and distribution of 3rd party apps.
Nice contradiction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I loves and hateses my Preciousss (Score:1, Interesting)
Either way, obviously iPhones would be way better if Apple didn't restrict development and distribution of 3rd party apps.
It probably wouldn't be where it is today if Apple didn't "restrict development and distribution of 3rd party apps." The app store is a hobby programmer's greatest dream. Apple makes everything nice & easy for the hobby programmer, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of apps available for the iPhone in a timeframe unheard of by other phone providers.
Re:Victory against monoculture (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually this is typical Microsoft, they obsess with the chief competitor before they attack. There are anecdotes that Redmond was awash in books on Java in the late '90s. Then came .NET 1.0, where the biggest difference with Sun's product seemed to be that LeadingCamelCase was the convention for method names instead of lowerCamelCase.
As Ballmer mentioned in his quote in TFA, Detroit was/is just the opposite. Apparently even when traveling executives were supposed to rent cars from the home brand, though you'd think that would be a useful occasion to familiarize themselves with the competition.
Re:Do they get the Microsoft products for free? (Score:2, Interesting)
Posting anon for obvious reasons.
If you buy a Windows Mobile phone at MS you can claim the cost of the phone back on expenses, but it's a small PITA to do. Even so, you don't get the celluar costs paid for, Windows Mobile or not, unless you're in sales, so considering I'm paying every month why on earth does anyone think management have a right to say what my money goes on? And that's where the article is wrong - no-one actually gives a shit, beyond Ballmer's grandstanding, and of course the WM team who should be expected to use their own phones. Heck if you don't believe the company meeting stunt was Ballmer was just that then you're an idiot.
Maybe Windows Phone 7 will turn that around, god knows I love and hate my iPhone in equal proportion.
Believe it or not, Microsoft is a pretty tolerant (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe it or not, Microsoft is a pretty tolerant company on the inside. You're not required to drink the kool-aid, and using non-Microosft products and services is not frowned upon. Almost everyone (at least in Redmond) uses Google for search, for instance. A lot of smartphone users use iPhone. Some use Android even (even though corp discounts obviously don't apply to either iPhone or Android plans or phones). It is not uncommon to see a Mac running Mac OS X, even though the corp network doesn't really support it. I haven't seen any Linux use on laptops, but that's probably because ACPI support in Linux sucks ass.
There are folks who proudly drink the Kool-Aid, and refuse to use anything non-Microsoft, of course, but they're in minority.
Having worked elsewhere after Microsoft, I've gained a lot of respect for this aspect of Microsoft corporate culture that I had taken for granted. I think at least someone at Microsoft understands that Microsoft has a lot to learn from the rest of the world, and corporate inbreeding is its worst possible enemy.
Re:Duh (Score:2, Interesting)
"most Windows phones tend to by made by companies who don't care about MS's image and so produce any old shit they can rustle up."
Bollocks.
You think they don't care about their own company's image?
Companies like HTC have been doing their best to get away from the shittiness that is Windows Mobile. But without having their own operating systems, they're a bit limited, so they don't want to piss off Microsoft too much. Apart from going with Google and Android, they've tried writing their own GUI to hide the poor Windows UI, but they can't really do anything about the basic bugginess of the OS.
Says a lot about the two companies that Apple can get it right virtually first time, while Windows Mobile is on releases 6.5 and 7, and Microsoft is still struggling to make it acceptable.
Re:Do they get the Microsoft products for free? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do they get the Microsoft products for free? If they do, then there's a real issue there.
If not, it's the employees money to do with what they please. Upper management needs to STFU.
MS employees don't get anything free. They get steep discounts on MS software (85% or so off), but only a small discount on on hardware. I have, on occasion, seen xboxes for sale commercially for less then in the employee store. I did a year long contract for MS in the mobile division and I never heard of upper management discouraging iPhone use. The FTEs on my team used a wide range of mobile devices and I think it really helped to broaden people's horizons. I think management understood that. That said, MS is a very large creature and I saw only a little corner of it.
Re:I loves and hateses my Preciousss (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple should have a right to keep their store the way they want, and reject any app the want.
On the other hand, I should have a right to run any program I want on my hardware.
I agree. But all the spam that I get and that we as an ISP have to fend-off or process is from the 99.9999% of morons in front of a PC that think exactly the same and download and install any crap-trojan that comes their way and poses as a screensaver or fake anti-virus.
At least, we don't get spam from iPhones. That alone makes Apple's decision worth the hassle!
Corporate inbreeding (Score:3, Interesting)
Another famous example of corporate inbreeding is the taboo against American auto workers driving Japanese cars. I think this taboo had a lot to do with why Detroit lost so much ground to the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s. Without the direct, everyday experience of comparing the quality of the cars they were building to those from Honda and Toyota, they just couldn't understand how far behind they really were and what was going to be needed to catch up. The truth is, GM and Ford management should have purchased Japanese cars themselves, given them away by lottery to 10% or 20% of their employees, and required those employees to drive them to work every day!
People need to get over their high-school-loyalty mindset and realize that having at least some employees familiar with the competition's product is critical.
Re:I loves and hateses my Preciousss (Score:3, Interesting)
They do not, in any way, do a line-by-line audit. Anyone with even a slight understanding of malicious software will know many ways to sneak malware past Apple.
According to this story:
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Researchers-show-infecting-smartphones-with-malware-is-relatively-easy-950091.html [h-online.com]
It's not so easy.
Quote: "According to the researchers, only Apple's AppStore offers a certain amount of protection against malicious applications. Brown and Tijerina said that the AppStore rigorously checks the source code for potential security problems caused by buffer overflows, copyright infringements, and permitted protocols as well as APIs."
So, yes, I'm sort-of an Apple-fanboi. But enough mistakes have been made with the Windows-platform. We don't need a deja-vu on any mobile platform.
Company loyalty / cohesion (Score:3, Interesting)
I work for a large consumer products company, and our sector is pretty competitive. If the marketers would come over to IT and see us using competitors products, they'd be pretty pissed. We're all part of one team, and sticking to our products is important to us. I think that's one reason why we're successful. We do have competitors products on our desks / shelves but only to learn from / motivate us to gain more share. I have a hard time using products from our competitors... even in segments that we don't compete in... who wants to give the enemy more ammo?
Re:but it doesn't "just work" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obsessesion (Score:1, Interesting)
I have to disagree with the statement it's the engineers' fault. Where I work (a very large consumer electronics company) our marketing and sales people come up with some rough idea but don't have enough technical knowledge to get the details right or figure out the inter-operation. Then, they go talk with the "customer" who adds more confusing input (or just plain gets it wrong). Finally, the "project management" team writes some specifications and hands it to engineers who have to "make it work".
Instead of engaging engineers at the outset, and including them at all points of discussion, engineers are the LAST to find out. And we're slapping our foreheads saying "this will work like shit" but ultimately no one listens until its out the door and end-users are saying "this sucks". And the sad part is the end-users' feedback never makes it way back to our sales/marketing, it goes to the "customer's" sales and marketing team who are just inept.
I think what Apple does differently is put the greatest amount of emphasis on the user experience, sometimes sacrificing good engineering practices in the process. Look at how many issues Apple has had with their Macbooks/Powerbooks, they push the envelope in making things thin and light, and end up cutting reliability. But, their UIs are *really* polished and using them is mostly favorable.
MS probably works like my company, the ideas get started by a smart person or a group of smartpeople, but by the time it gets filtered through the "management" and "leadership" the essence is lost and the result is lack luster.
Re:I loves and hateses my Preciousss (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not a love/hate relationship, it's a love/love relationship. You love your iPhone, but you also love the Nerd Police propaganda that surrounds it.
The propaganda says Apple and AT&T have made some kind of pact with the devil to keep you enslaved to them. But reliance on AT&T comes out of the fact that AT&T runs the one (1) and only GSM 3G network in the United States of America. Don't blame Apple (or Nokia) for that. Blame Verizon and Sprint for building out proprietary networking and making themselves a tiny island in a global communications network. Verizon didn't want you to run a phone that they didn't sell you, and they succeeded. And remember tethering is working all over the world. Apple made it so you just flip a switch and it works, like everything else. In many, many countries you can choose which network to run your iPhone on because there is competition in GSM 3G in those countries.
The propaganda says you have no choice in what apps you run. But you can not only choose what apps to run, there are 2 independent app environments. You can choose from hundreds of thousands of completely open, completely unmediated, completely unmanaged Web apps on your iPhone because it has a desktop-class HTML5 open source Apple WebKit browser with touch controls, local storage, offline operation, accelerated 3D graphics, and home screen icons just like App Store apps. HTML5 is a totally open API, apps can be made with any tools, deployed on any HTTP server, and in many cases the apps are more sophisticated than what are available in the native app environments on other phones. As an added bonus, you can also choose from 150,000 managed apps, that even though they are native, are safe enough that you can install and use them as quickly and easily as music and movies. That is handy since it's a phone, you're on the go, you see an app on your friend's phone and you want it and you click INSTALL and you are using it. When Android Market has already served up malware and most phones have almost no native apps, criticism of the iPhone's app system is truly weak. Potential native iPhone malwares have been demoed at security conferences but there is no way to deploy them.
So my advice to you is to believe the evidence of your own senses, or else trade in your iPhone for a netbook running Linux and Skype.
i dont get the whole anti-windows mobile thing (Score:2, Interesting)
I may be on the fringe here, but I like my windows mobile phone..always have.
Windows mobile and the iphone each cater to a different class of user. iPhone undoubtably caters to the larger class, the media-hungry chic consumer. Microsoft to the smaller, corporate minded consumer. For the purpose of comparison we'll call the iphone class, class 1, and the corporate class, class 2. Yes the iPhone has a great UI, no denying that. They're design is sleek and clean. It's beautiful.
Now if microsoft can just add on a UI and app store geared toward class 1 they'd be fine. Personally, i'd be happy if they had 2 UI themes. The first defaulting to class 1 and the 2nd to class 2 and letting me choose between the two with ease.
I don't think they should force themselves to reinvent the wheel here. Look, the iPhone interface works.They have a lot of information on what works. Do that. Forget about the criticism you'll get from making your UI iPhone like, being a copy-cat or whatever.
I'm squarely in class 2 of users. I'm an IT guy. I love running apps in the background. My VPN app is designed for windows mobile. I love tethering, and I actually love the interface. Email on the main screen, check. Calendar there, check. Battery level, check. Remote desktop, ssh, check. Anything that doesn't have those things for me as an IT guy gets chucked.
Next phone, HTC Touch HD2, it's a no-brainer for me. There's no viable alternatives.
On a side note, i was considering an iPad. Love the discounted 3G plan (let's face it, t-mobile and verizon's $60 mobile broadband plans are WAY overpriced).
Love the form factor, size, no physical keyboard, just what i wanted for mobile IT administration. But then, no multitasking, no VPN for me, once again, it gets chucked. The day there's a viable windows based tablet (e.g. HP slate), i'm there.
-Tony
Re:The google route. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that I'm a fan of Apple by any means. I wouldn't switch from my Hero to an iPhone if you paid me. But it's not the same type of walled garden, although it may feel like it superficially.
Re:Microsoft's Own Products? (Score:2, Interesting)
Amusing, but not relevant. Microsoft makes a phone OS (not a very good one, but, nevertheless...). They also partner with a bunch of hardware manufacturers who make phones that run their OS.
By the same token, you could say that Google don't make a phone, since the Nexus is manufactured by HTC.
Eh no? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you go to a deaker, all the employees will drive their own brand. And if you got a production plant, the vast majority of the cars will be of the brand produced there. Yes of course there are exceptions, you will see plenty of other cars brands outside the Ferrari plant. But if you work at Ford, you drive ford. And nobody at DAF would consider using anything but DAF trucks for their own company.
Since MS employees are highly likely to get a discount on MS products it is extremely telling that it can't even sell its own dog food to its own employees.
It just doesn't send the right message. You wouldn't think it normal if the vast majority of MS employees used Mac's would you?
Re:I loves and hateses my Preciousss (Score:2, Interesting)