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Intel Giving Away Free Computers To Employees
Merlyn42 writes, "According to this article at Intel's Web site, Intel is giving Pentium III systems and lots of goodies, including free Internet access, to all its employees. Who else is going to follow this new trend started by Ford?" Don't know, but I wonder how many 'geek houses' we'll see comprised of five Intel employees living in a house with free systems. The cool thing is that the site says that they can use the systems for whatever they want.
Intel are getting really desperate aren't they? The things they'll do to keep their own employees from buying AMD based PC's... (yes, i'm being a bit sarcastic ;-))
Ford should have patented the "process" of giving away computer to employees, to protect their intellectual investment. Then they could license the process to companies like Intel who want to increase their productivity too.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I'd like to see all the major computer companies do this. After all, the computer portion of it is cheap. It's only when the employee says "You expect me to work at home, so you must fix my problems..." that it actually has some cost to it.
I work at AMD and our cubicals are $1500/month/employee. Computers are nothing by comparison.
Josh
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
Or maybe I'm talking out my ass again...
Where my wife works, they've had a rebate program for several years - the company kicked in some money (a couple of thousand at one point) towards your purchase of a new computer, as an interest free loan. Several of the smaller companies I've come into contact with have had similar programs.
Unfortunately, it appears that as companies grow, benefits like this start disappearing... We'll probably be buying a new Mac G4 under the program at my wife's company soon, as their HR department has started grumblings about doing away with the program.
This is part of what confuses me: it almost universally seems that HR ends up being the department that "champions" cutting the really interesting, set-your-company-apart-from-the-crowd type of benefits... and that only seems to happen when the company reaches some critical mass (200+ people).
Now, it looks as if at some other breakpoint - when you reach the size of GM, or Intel - something else happens internally. I would be really interested to know who lobbied for these initiatives, why they did so, and how they convinced the executives/board/whoever that it was actually in the company's best interest to actually add a benefit instead of "restructuring" one or taking one away.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Here's the employee bulliten:
- ---------------------- - ----------------------
INTEL EMPLOYEES WORLDWIDE TO RECEIVE PCs WITH INTERNET ACCESS FOR HOME USE
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Published by Worldwide Employee Communications
March 7, 2000
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Intel is announcing the Intel® Home PC Program, an exciting and ongoing new
benefit designed to provide every Intel employee worldwide with a high
performance PC package and Internet access for personal use at home. Home
delivery of PCs will begin in the third quarter of 2000.
Detailed information about this new benefit is available on Circuit on the
Intel intranet at >
Sponsored by Human Resources and Information Technology, the Home PC Program
will help employees, Intel retirees and their families to participate fully
in the information revolution and take advantage of the education and
e-Commerce opportunities offered by the Internet.
HR and IT project teams are working to make this program a positive
experience for employees and families around the world and will release
additional details about the program as negotiations with vendors and
suppliers proceed.
Blue-badge full-time and part-time Intel employees will be eligible if they
are on the payroll as of a particular date in Q3 that will be selected and
announced later. Intel retirees also will participate. They will receive a
performance segment personal computer with a Pentium® III processor, and
unlimited Internet access. In addition, the offer will include a printer,
Intel® Create & Share(tm) Camera Pack, keyboard, mouse, monitor, graphics
adapter, unlimited use of Internet service, software, tech support and the
choice of one Intel® Play(tm) PC-enhanced toy.
Intel will offer the PC package and Internet access to employees at no
charge to them. Because it is a new kind of benefit, the tax treatment has
not been determined. Intel believes this should not be a taxable item for
employees. In the event government agencies say otherwise, Intel will pay a
portion of taxes through a benefit available to employees who require it.
Intel is requesting proposals from potential suppliers of hardware and
software and from potential vendors of Internet access.
Intel gets to tax deduct the cost of the PCs as a business expense (probably leased?), whereas employees would have to use precious aftertax $$$. Thus it would literally cost employees twice as much to buy the same PCs. This is a nice way of getting wealth into the hands of workers without getting raped by the IRS.
Remember kids, employer-paid health insurance started as a way of getting around FDR's WWII wage and price controls. Hopefully we won't wind up with the same screwed up political consequences with employer-paid PCs, tho the "Digital Divide" propaganda is disconcerting.
Sure would be a lot easier if Big Brother didn't confiscate 4-6 months per year of our labor in the first place, then we could buy our own toys with our own money.
This is quite common actually, I think the only big deal is that Intel have quite a few more employees then DBC. But eg. Nokia here in copenhagen do the same, although I'm not quite sure if this goes for all employees.
funny thing thing is, almost every home in .dk has a pc, yet companies in .dk have done this for a long time, even teachers are getting pc's these days. Must be a socialist thing.
/dev/eskil ---
Free PC with built-in hardware ID number (no, that hasn't gone away just because people aren't pissed off about it any more) plus free Internet access. Wow, sounds like the perfect scenario for realworld testing of meterware (pay-per-use software) which was the whole point of the ID number anyways.
Oh, and BTW, meterware is unbeatable. It is the only method that I've ever been able to imagine that is unbreakable (unless you go to court and claim it wasn't you using the system). Picture this: You're going to run Word2k (it would surprise you that an Intel employee was using Windows? Wintel remember) and Word2k needs to call a function SlowDown(). Dynamic linking checks and finds out where SlowDown() is. Oh, it's a COM object on the microsoft.com server. Connect to microsoft.com and send the parameters or whatever and then get the result... if that SlowDown() function is system-critical, this method is foolproof barring someone stealing the DLL or whatever from microsoft.com's server, hacking the program to use it locally, etc.
So, besides getting the net access and PC, they happen to get any up-and-coming software pre-installed?
Esperandi
Call me naive and overly optimistic, but to somewhat respond to all the paranoia I have seen flying around on this subject, why does anyone think Intel even WANTS to track it's employees. Yes, I know all the corporate PR on this subject (I DO work for a multinational, and yes, only trust them as far as I can throw them), but to understand big mean megacorp (TM) you must think like it's executives:
This is the Infrmation Age (Or at least thats what my marketing people tell me)
My Children have a computer (Assuming the exec has children, this is just an example)
They have internet access
They are more productive on class assignments because they have internet access (Remember, a good fast connection and cable preclude actually having to PARENT your children)
So, maybe if I give my employees computers and internet access, they will be more productive on take-home assignments and therefore make me more money so I can buy that second fleet of yachts.
I want to know why everybody seems to think that this is the opening salvo in more Big Brother tactics from Corporations? The Tactics of Northwest aside (one company among THOUSANDS), what the employees do at home is thier buisiness, and the corporations, in thier pursuit of the almighty bottom line, are not going to pour the money into survaillence of every customer without expecting a great return, and there is just no return there. Now, if it were the Government giving out these PC's, I would worry......
You say you want a revolution....
I dunno, as an intel employee, I'm pretty excited to get a free box to crack more rc5 keys with. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I'm certianly not turning it down on some paranoid notion that Intel will have some secret deal with whatever OEM provides the box to get my serial number. Especially since I'll just disable it's transmission in my bios (I doubt the oem will write a special bios that won't allow me to turn it off). And, yes, the employees will own their machine and intel won't have any more right to look at it's contents than the do with the machines I have now.
:). The cool thing is that in the internal faq, it says that there's a possibility that the internet access won't necessairally be dialup. They may have cable/dsl/isdn options or something... they're not sure yet. Also, you get that (kinda) neat microscope that hooks up to your (windows) box. I saw it at the store and thought, "hrmmm... that might be fun to play with".
However, I'm not one of the people that will benifit the most. Of the 70,000+ employees and reitrees Intel has, many of them work at fabs in countries where computers are much less prevalent. They say they're trying to find an internet access option for all the employees too. I think that's pretty cool.
Actually, working extra hours (at home or at work) is supposedly forbidden by intel's pollicies (yeah, that really works