My first day at Microsoft, I was worried about this. This worry dissipated once I saw my boss's boss pull one out in a meeting.
Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
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Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#12When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2003, I brought my PowerBook into work. Sometimes coworkers would give me shit, and I would offer to start using a windows laptop once they used MSN Search instead of Google for all their web searches. At the time, MSN search was so bad that this proposition was ludicrous. In fact, every Office developer I knew used Google with a "site:msdn.microsoft.com" restriction to search the…
There's no comparison. Search wasn't a big business for anyone then. Microsoft has been in the smartphone business for a while and it's an extremely sore subject.
It really comes down to this: why work at a company whose products you're not excited about? This is part of Google and Apple's success. You were an intern then, so you're fine, but more senior, high-level employees better be using your company products--otherwise, they're doing a shitty job and need to be fired.
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#13Microsoft seems a lot more tolerant of competing hardware than I expected. Somehow I doubt they're as relaxed about it in Cupertino.
That's a good question to pose to apple employees. I wonder if they can comment at all. :p But to their credit, as I discuss above, their loyalty is a big part of Apple's success.
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#14If Ballmer was smart he would encourage the use of the iPhone and other competing phones, since that is the reality... Then tell employees to take notes from the form factor, software, usability, developer market and experience. He's completely backwards on this.
Right. I think that one thing is eating your own dog food, another is trying to forbid employees using rival technology (hopelessly, as we can read in this article). I think this pisses off employees and this is the last thing Microsoft can afford right now. The best for them is to use both the iPhone and some Microsoft phone to take note of the differences and help improve the latter.
It's like forbidding one game developer playing the games of another, or even discussing them. Stupid.
I work at game studio, and all designers are researching and playing other games actively (be it owned by the parent company, or others).
I mean.... How else??
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#15Microsoft seems a lot more tolerant of competing hardware than I expected. Somehow I doubt they're as relaxed about it in Cupertino.
That's a good question to pose to apple employees. I wonder if they can comment at all. :p But to their credit, as I discuss above, their loyalty is a big part of Apple's success.
Is that so? How about iTunes, QuickTime, WebObjects, BootCamp technologies? Apple surely knows that Windows is, and still is the most used OS. (And, I'm typing this from my MBP).
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#16When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2003, I brought my PowerBook into work. Sometimes coworkers would give me shit, and I would offer to start using a windows laptop once they used MSN Search instead of Google for all their web searches. At the time, MSN search was so bad that this proposition was ludicrous. In fact, every Office developer I knew used Google with a "site:msdn.microsoft.com" restriction to search the…
There's no comparison. Search wasn't a big business for anyone then. Microsoft has been in the smartphone business for a while and it's an extremely sore subject. It really comes down to this: why work at a company whose products you're not excited about? This is part of Google and Apple's success. You were an intern then, so you're fine, but more senior, high-level employees better be using your company products--ot…
"why work at a company whose products you're not excited about?"
Microsoft has a lot of products. It would be unnatural for every employee who worked there to be excited about every single one of those products. I can understand the cognitive dissonance issues of working in a division that produced products that you weren't excited about, but as for the entirety of Microsoft I think that's an unrealistic idea.
The only way to be excited equally about all of Microsoft's products (in preference to all of their competitors) is to have drunken the kool-aid so deeply that you've lost the ability to judge anything fairly. This is a far more dangerous scenario than a company that produces some products that are second run in comparison to some of their rivals. The former is a recipe for a company full of zealots who drive the company into the ground due to their lack of fair judgement, the former is to be expected of any company that has a huge and widely varied product offering spanning multiple industries.
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#17When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2003, I brought my PowerBook into work. Sometimes coworkers would give me shit, and I would offer to start using a windows laptop once they used MSN Search instead of Google for all their web searches. At the time, MSN search was so bad that this proposition was ludicrous. In fact, every Office developer I knew used Google with a "site:msdn.microsoft.com" restriction to search the…
Does that mean that msdn.microsoft.com performed acceptably in 2003 when you were on MS's network?
I've always found MSDN's online access to be dreadfully slow. The lack of a proper rich client - dynamically updating index in particular - for MSDN content in VS2010, so far, is disturbing to me - I generally find APIs using the index followed by contextual tree navigation, both of which don't work nearly as well in web apps.
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#18Leaders are often insulated from reality by people around them, especially if they have a penchant for violent outbursts.
See the 'chair' incident and the movie 'Der Untergang'.
I'm sure Jobs and others in the industry have similar reality distortion fields around them.
But I highly doubt that at the lower levels in the microsoft organization they'd be this myopic, and a bunch of anecdotes here and elsewhere about microsoft employees owning hardware produced by competitors and displaying them openly at work seems to confirm that doubt.
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#19I'm pretty sure this article is one of those filler pieces that are in the writer's back pocket in case he can't think of something else to write about.
I take my iPhone and MBP up to the Bellevue and Redmond offices all the time. I get some weird looks sometimes when I pull out the laptop in the cafeteria but when they see I'm running Windows 7 and I'm doing stuff on the intranet, their attitude turns to curiosity. I've had many questions like "How does CorpNet work on your Mac?" My usual response: "Very well."
Sure you can eat your own dog food or whatever the cool new term for this is but there's also something about using the tools that work well for the job. I don't really run anything important for work on my Mac. All of my code builds/runs on lab machines or a desktop that sits in the office which I can connect to via Remote Desktop Connection. My Mac works great as a thin client to these machines.
Re: Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
#20Leaders are often insulated from reality by people around them, especially if they have a penchant for violent outbursts. See the 'chair' incident and the movie 'Der Untergang'. I'm sure Jobs and others in the industry have similar reality distortion fields around them. But I highly doubt that at the lower levels in the microsoft organization they'd be this myopic, and a bunch of anecdotes here and elsewhere about mi…
A note for those of us who perhaps know "unter" but not "untergang": the official movie title English translation of Der Untergang is Downfall. My GE dictionary suggests setting, sinking, fig. ruin.