Microsoft Barring Certain Staff From Buying Macs, iPads? 416
mr100percent writes "Microsoft has reportedly moved to prohibit employees in its Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, and Operations Group (SMSG) from using company funds to purchase any products produced by Apple. The company had already barred staffers from using expense allocations for competing smartphone platforms, however the new guidelines explicitly note that Macs and iPads have been added to the list. 'Within SMSG we are putting in place a new policy that says that Apple products (Mac & iPad) should not be purchased with company funds,' an alleged letter distributed to staff reads."
Sounds Reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
The Car Analogy (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting, though, that it's only certain departments, not the entire company. Going back to Ford, many of the senior levels I knew were allowed to buy (or at least drive company-owned cars) that were the competition. They claimed it helped them learn about the competition. I have no problem with that.
Re:Barring? (Score:0, Informative)
always, for definitions of always that only encompass sufficiently short time periods.
M$ used Sun servers + sendmail for internal email, until a customer who tried to scale exchange beyond a few users asked them how they were managing to scale exchange for Microsoft's internal mail, and M$ had to answer, they didn't use exchange at M$.
It was only after the above incident, that M$ made any effort to "eat their own dogfood," and it was as painful for them as it was for all their customers.
M$ bought hotmail, and tried to switch to M$ servers from Sun. They had a couple week long outage where they discovered that even more windows hosts on faster hardware could not scale to the load. They switched back to Sun hardware and Solaris for hotmail, and it was a long time before they tried to migrate to Windows again.
Re:Barring? (Score:2, Informative)
What you need is gvim, vcs, and a compiler
I have me a hammer! I sure do see a lot of nails!
Re:Barring? (Score:3, Informative)
And also worth considering is that a typical mac product costs an awful lot more.
No its doesnt, stop this myth. Our Dell laptops are almost 200 dollars more expensive than a like equipped Macbook Pro. The cost significance is so great that we are thinking of dropping Dells all together and moving to Macbook Airs for both PC AND Mac users because even with Win7 licensing costs added, its STILL cheaper to buy a 1 grand MacBook Air over a like model Dell.
Ever seen data entry staff sitting in rows on iPads? No of course not.
You bet your ass I have seen 60 Sales and Marketing staffers using iPads in the field, and we are starting to move 500 positions who DONT need a laptop or desktop to using iPads running Citrix within the next 2 years.
So in conclusion, you dont know jack about how iPads are being used in big business.
Re:allow moderation of the stories (Score:5, Informative)
That's the Firehose.
The users already do moderate those, but then the editors get a 1000% weighted vote to override the user moderations and post whatever they like.
Re:Barring? (Score:4, Informative)
Most major breweries in the U.S. (even Guinness - *SOB*) are owned and operated from overseas. Brew your own!
This may be one of the most (unintentionally?) funny things I've ever read on /. No kidding? A famous UK brand isn't US-owned? Wow?
Re:Barring? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Barring? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, this isn't anywhere close to the truth. MS used an in-house developed Xenix-based mail system internally prior to the release of Exchange 4.0 (the first version of exchange, and a followup to MSMail 3.0). Starting in the last phase before release and continuing for a few months or so ITG did a phased migration off of Xenix mail and onto Exchange. There wasn't any particular pain outside the usual complexity of doing any large migration. This was all well before Hotmail was a part of Microsoft.
Source: I was on the exchange team at the time.
Re:Ah, stupid manager alert! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Barring? (Score:2, Informative)
If you're going to criticize someone's geography, at least get it right yourself. Ireland is not in the UK.
Re:Barring? (Score:5, Informative)
Of all things, you went to choose the Republic of Ireland's most known symbol to say that is UK?
Ok, I know, uk, england, northern ireland, great britain, commonwealth, queen's territories, all this crap IS confusing. But let me get you a couple of things straight:
- Ireland is an Island. On it, there are two countries. One is Northern Ireland, another is Republic of Ireland;
- Northern Ireland is part of UK, commonwealth or whatever. Its currency is the british pound. Its capital is Belfast
- Republic of Ireland is an independent country which today has nothing to do with uk. It is part of the Euro zone. Its capital is Dublin. DUBLIN THE CITY WHERE GUINNESS IS MADE (mostly)
- There is some animosity between the Irish and the British, to say the least. What you just said might be considered offensive in there.
Republic of Ireland is not the most resourceful country on the planet, granted. But two things you can bet they are very proud of: Their Guinness and their Jameson's.
Re:Barring? (Score:4, Informative)
"you need to pay for a extended warranty"
Funny, nobody at Best Buy held a gun to my head demanding I buy an extended warranty. But that was in 2007 with my 17" macbook pro that has worked perfectly still to this day AND still holds a 2 hour charge on it's battery.
Let me guess you are one of those people that never has owned a mac product but tries to sound like you know what you are talking about.
Re:Barring? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually Guinness is a UK owned company. Diageo owns Guinness [wikipedia.org]