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iPod Most Popular Music Player on Microsoft Campus
bblazer writes "Wired is running an article about how despite the displeasure of management, the iPod is the most popular music player on the Microsoft campus. The article states that 80% of those who have digital music players have an iPod. Employees have even started using different headphones to be a bit more stealthy about it."
I wonder if Microsoft employees use a disproportionately large number of MACs, or are more likely to be Firefox users. I mean, fast food workers never want to eat where they have worked, and people who work at many factories refuse to buy products from that factory. Maybe they feel hatred towards their employer.
MS has an unsecured network for test projects - a little bird told me that when launching iTunes on this unsecured network (from within the MS campus) you can see dozens, if not hundreds of shared iTunes libraries--all being shared by Rendezvous.
Robert Scoble--one of the people mentioned in the article--has already written about it. "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees own an MP3 player. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in... the story is a non-starter. I know a lot of Apple employees who play Halo 2 too. Is that a story?"
Ed Bott has some good comments too: "Now read the story. Read it carefully.... Note that the entire thingis based on an interview with one "high-level [Microsoft] manager who asked to remain anonymous." From this one source, we are able to calculate with confidence that 16,000 employees at Microsoft's Redmond campus own iPods... taking an offhand remark from an unknown source (who may or may not have a hidden agenda and who may or may not know what he's talking about) and extrapolating it to the entire campus is just silly...
One thing they teach you in Journalism 101 is that when you have a single anonymous source, you don't have a story. That's still true."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Microsoft bought a small amount of non-voting stock in Apple some time ago as part of a deal that kept IE and Office on the Mac platform.
Microsoft has long since sold those shares, at a fair profit I might add."
Actually, Microsoft 'bought' the nonvoting stock to prevent Steve Jobs from suing their ass over blatent rips of Quicktime that was brought to his attention while Owner / CEO of NeXT. It meant nothing to him at the time because he was a scorned man, having been fired by the company he started several years earlier. Once NeXT was bought up and he was brought on as a 'consultant', he was once again in a position to care about Apple's goings-on and layed it on the line with Bill that Microsoft was going to be sued and even at their weakest, Apple had several billion in the bank (and to this day, in a much more liquid form than Microsoft).
As such, it was deemed that Microsoft would save face by 'investing' almost a billion in nonvoting stock that should have by all means been worthless after a few years with Apple's then track record, but at the same time, no one expected SJ to make a return as he had (most expected at the time, he'd transition NeXT to Apple and go to the next little 'big thing' he had planned). This also helped in the rublings of the Antitrust suit in Microsoft's advantage.
Microsoft was never supposed to make any money, but it nearly doubled their investment by the time they cashed out.
I got this info from one of the higher ups at Apple at a conference about the time of the investment...but as I'm posting as an AC, you should take this with a grain of salt.
Seamless integration with Windows, a family of operating systems that over 90% of the public uses, and which only one company has full access to the internals of: Microsoft.
Hah! Windows doesn't even seamlessly integrate with itself, much less external products. Microsoft wouldn't know seamless integration if it hit them over the head while crying out, "Hello! I am seamless integration!"
Of course, they can pretend, which convinces most people.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Coke employees who drink Pepsi get fired.
No questions asked, no fighting for your job. You get fired. This includes if your boss sees you at Pizza Hut, Taco Bell or KFC, since those entities are owned by TriCon, who also owns Pepsi.
Coke's employee base is very nearly fanatical in their loyalty to their product, and use of "the blue" is not accepted. I worked in a building *owned* by Coke, and we were not even allowed to have a Pepsi machine on our floor.
Unlike you, Microsoft knows the full power of Group Policies, and how the entire network can be configured to deny installation of external devices. Resorting to imperfect physical security would only annoy employees while failing to protect against cursory concealment techniques.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
As a Coke employee, if I brought a pepsi product to work (say as part of my brown bag lunch), it's looked down on pretty harshly. It's almost to the point of being grounds for termination. It's not just a can of pepsi soda, but any of Pepsi's brands (chips, snacks, fruit juices etc...).
MSFT doesn't fire people for wearing iPODs...
How many iPods do you figure Apple gives to it's administrative assistants?
I would be shocked if the answer is smaller than the number of administrative assistants with satisfactory performance. It's cheaper than giving a cash bonus for the price of iPod and you get free viral marketing both to visitors and to general population of Bay Area.
> in their haste to hype a "Microsoft buys Apple" story, the press
> often ignores three important facts
No kidding. That was some of the worst tech reporting I had seen at the time.
They also ignored that as part of the deal, Apple dropped their lawsuit against Microsoft for stealing QuickTime software code, Microsoft agreed to develop Office for the Mac for five years, and Apple agreed to not develop any new text-to-speech capabilities for the Mac (this one wasn't allowed to leak for a while).
I don't know how this information was kept secret -- both companies are publically owned (and I own shares of both, so I get their annual reports), so they should have had to disclose it.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
GM encourages their employees to ask for non-GM cars when renting so as to check out the competition. You steal ideas where you can find them.
Coke and Pepsi compete. Microsoft and Apple don't really compete. Microsoft makes software, Apple makes hardware. True, the PC is viewed as MS domain, but MS doesn't actually manufacture the hardware. On this specific topic, MS doesn't have a product to compete with the Ipod. Sure, .wma is the format that MS would like to see adopted as the standard format for media content, but they aren't actually selling content in that format.
MS even makes software for Apple computers. This would be akin to Coke making drink holders for Pepsi products if the analogy held true.
When I worked at MS, I used to get a kick out of wearing an imac shirt I got from an apple vendor a couple of years ago. Most people wouldn't give it second notice, but every now and then, a clueless drone would make a comment. Now if I showed up with wearing a 'Linux Roxorz MS Boxorz!' shirt, I'm sure that would raise a few eyebrows....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
- Coke's employee base is very nearly fanatical in their loyalty to their product
It's not just Coke/Pepsi. The husband of a lady I work with is employed by DPSUBG (Dr. Pepper, Seven-up Bottling group). One of their key products is Royal Crown cola (RC).When RC big-wigs are in town for a visit, the local account reps get a detailed agenda built, including all dining stops while said big-wig is in town.
The local reps then work with the restaruants to make sure that RC and only RC is served in the presence of said Royal Crown big-wig.
There is just about no place I know of in town that serves RC products. So this is a highly choreographed ritual they go through about twice a year. They even coach the hostesses and wait staff to offer an "RC" cola, not just a "soda" or even worse a "Coke".