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.

Comments

Cost of this.

[The_H0und]

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

Inverse bell curve?

[Samrobb]

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.

it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the employee bulliten:

INTEL EMPLOYEES WORLDWIDE TO RECEIVE PCs WITH INTERNET ACCESS FOR HOME USE

------------------------------------------------ ----------------------
Published by Worldwide Employee Communications
March 7, 2000
------------------------------------------------ ----------------------

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.

Tax dodge

[Brian Stretch]

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.

Possibilities

[Esperandi]

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