21–27 of 27 posts
Microsoft seems a lot more tolerant of competing hardware than I expected. Somehow I doubt they're as relaxed about it in Cupertino.
To be fair though, Apple did give all their employees an iPhone when they came out.
So I work at Microsoft. Specifically on the Windows team. I honestly can't say I've ever had any issues using my iPhone or MacBook Pro there. During my interview we joked about how I had not used Windows (or any Microsoft product) in a serious capacity for over a decade. I run Apple on the desktop and Linux on servers. They seemed to like this diversity coming in on the team. I joined a few months before Win7 shipped…
EX: Most people in our office want to add Excel Graphs and then edit them and on average PowerPoint crashes around 4-5 times a day. This is fairly basic functionality that most poeple using PowerPoint in the workplace actually want and it just fails randomly way to often. But, I am not talking about a new issue this is several years old and it's not getting any better.
I really like Visual Studio + C# but anything past the most basic windows features and you get into voodoo land where you just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. I know I am looking for the happy path and I know I can find it but sometimes it's in a vary strange place.
This is the type of things eat your own dog food is supposed to fix, yet for some reason that's not happening.
PS: I still think many MS products are the best option for a lot of things. But, often it's the surface that's great, it's easy to install, it does the basics just fine, and the deeper you go the worse things look.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 on…
Steve Ballmer: What happens when the serial killer from "silence of the lambs" becomes when he escapes from prison and takes on a new identity. But seriously, does Microsoft buy its employees Windows Mobile phone? No? That's why nobody has them; why pay money for an inferior product just because you work there? At least Google buys everyone an Android phone. I work for a bank. I don't put my money in this bank, becau…
I know it's off-topic, but why would you want to work for a company that treats its customers so badly? I mean, if they don't care about their customers they probably don't care much about you either, so it's entirely likely that you could do better working for someone who actually gives a fuck.
If that was what he truly believed, then the mobile-phone division is in trouble, because their leader is completely out of touch with reality.
I was present for this. It was a self-deprecating joke, not an actual admonition, and Ballmer later addressed the fact that Microsoft just isn't competitive in mobile right now, and tried to hype up Windows Mobile 7 (as it was then known).
I worked at MSFT last summer, and I had an iPhone. So did my (full time) office mate. So did my mentor. I think my team's dev lead did too. Probably around 40-50% of my team did. It wasn't frowned upon at all. I also used Opera on my work machines and the most I encountered was curiosity.
Every time one of these "Microsofties can't use competitors' products" articles comes up I find it really frustrating, because it's at best an inaccurate generalization.
>The perils of being an iPhone user at Microsoft were on display last September. At an all- company meeting in a Seattle sports stadium, one hapless employee used his iPhone to snap photos of Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. Mr. Ballmer snatched the iPhone out of the employee's hands, placed it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it in front of thousands of Microsoft workers, according to people present.…
In a 100,000 person company, you're going to have some douches, but the vast majority of people couldn't care less what kind of phone you use.