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Vista to Create 50,000 Jobs in Europe
prostoalex writes "A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to European economy, as it 'will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there,' News.com reports. Europe will see a total of 1.2 mln paychecks thanks to the new operating system: 'In the six countries studied, more than 150,000 IT companies will produce, sell or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista in 2007 and will employ 400,000 people, IDC said. Another 650,000 will be employed in the IT departments of businesses that rely on Vista.'"
Business will not be "upgrading" if it requires even more staff to admin Vista!
Gives a whole new meaning to the "Broken Windows" fallacy of economics.
A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to European economy, as it 'will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there
That's like saying hurricane Katrina was a boon to the New Orleans economy, as it instantly created thousands of search & rescue, demolition, rebuilding and emergency management jobs.
You can spin anything any way you like.
Vista to destroy 50,000 jobs in Europe
Due to the cessation of Windows XP, hordes of people employed to manage, fix and repair systems based around Windows XP will lose their jobs.
Luckily they are mostly expected to get jobs managing, fixing and repairing Windows Vista systems.
It's a Microsoft sponsored study, I'm suprised that they didn't say it would create 20 billion new jobs, cure aids, end world hunger, capture osama bin laden, find WMD in Iraq and still be simple enough for someone as stupid as Bush to use (ok, that last one might be stretching it)
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
Microsoft placates to populous to try to pressure EU to stop suing them for monopolistic practices. Could this read any more like a spin piece to deflect from the EU lawsuit stuff?
stuff |
Or is it just an attempt to derail any European plans to charge them with more anti-trust violations since MS is helping their economy? I just don't see the point here.
And that's not even counting all the people who will be working full-time to help homes and businesses cope with all of the problems and innefficiencies! And what about all the bankruptcy lawyers who will be helping people cope with the enormous cost of this needless upgrade?!
Yeah, so either way we look at this, either as said above businesses will not upgrade cos it will require these huge projected "extra" staff to accomodate, or if they can get by with existing staffing levels then there won't actually be any new jobs created by Vista... which is it?
Businesses are already overwhelmed by the costs of administering Windows, and the sad thing is, Microsoft makes Windows admins re-learn everything every few years because they change the One True Way to manage a network. They say they're trying to make things better, but it's the same problem with developing for MS platforms: everything changes every few years.
Vista is so complex that it's going to be a nightmare to try to get a handle on it. These new jobs are glaziers making glass for windows broken by boys throwing rocks. False industry, and a burden on resources. These people could be doing something productive but instead they'll be put to work holding Vista together.
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.
Clearly these "companies [that] will produce, sell or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista" are ones that would have been doing the same with XP.
Same goes for those that "will be employed in the IT departments of businesses that rely on Vista." Because previously they were using XP.
Vista brings nothing to Europe, but this is just about the EU actually making a stand against Microsoft's illegal actions.
There is already a shortage of capable ICT personel in Europe.
Oh wait...
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Having 650,000 people chasing around doing things that do not need to be done is *not* good for the economy unless the end result is that production is greater (over the whole economy) than the gain that could be made of the alternative use of their time.
Now while I could probably be convinced that Windows Vista has _some_ productivity benefits over current systems I doubt it's really that large. In many cases the net contribution of these 650k people is going to be in fact negative as their disruption and need to prove their own continued usefullness actually decreases productivity of society as a whole - fixing things that aren't broken for example.
Beep beep.
Did you reboot the machine?
Well, maybe you need to reinstall the OS.
And here I thought that more and more countries in the EU are going Linux and FOSS. I do assume, if the study is true, that European copies of Vista won't be including Windows Media Player.
Huge boom in independent services of user support, helpdesk, troubleshooting etc. Lots of jobs for getting failed critical systems back online. And a huge boom in disaster recovery sector.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's all bollocks. Those jobs will be people milling round doing "upgrades" and fixing problems instead of doing someting useful. And they don't seem to want to hear about the LOSS to the economy in all that MS tax danegeld leaving the EU economy where it coulf have helped paid for such trivia as hospitals, welfare ec.
Does the study state the decline in jobs for XP related positions? I think it evens itself out in the end...
Perhaps we should persuade motor manufacturers to make more unreliable cars to increase the employment opportunities for mechanics?
I agree that creating jobs is nice for the economy, but if the goal was creating useless jobs; we might as well go back to sending snail-mail and using typewriters. I can't see that the existing staff couldn't perform the install at a slower pace.
According to the article, from what I could tell the jobs were all just about upgrading hardware and software. There was no discussion about unique capabilities of Vista spawning whole new industries or applications.
If I were an IT decision-maker in Europe I might read this differently. Hmmm, 50,000 jobs is a lot of Euros. What exactly are we getting for that huge expenditure? Maybe we should think a little more carefully about doing this upgrade and consider the alternatives.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Wow.
So they're twisting the EU away from fines this way now.
What a bunch of losers.
...the study did not explicitly mention that about 40.000 of those were actually psychotherapists.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Back around 1992(?) Steve Gibson[1] wrote a column in which he predicted that by the year 2000 50% of the world's population would be employed supporting Windows for the other 50%. At this point I don't think he was far wrong.
sPh
[1] The old SpinRite guy who wrote a lot of good utilities in the DOS era.
Sweet jesus, they're bragging about what a maintenance and support nightmare they're creating?
They probably could fix overpopulation too if they'd ship cyanide capsules with the installation media.
- More people
- More machines
to run the same applications. Way to go Microsoft !! Another one like that and organisations will switch to Linux instead of upgrading.
Thank you, really
Znort
$$ is a certainty in this case, perhaps we should ask the EU what they would think if we deliberately broke linux to 'create jobs'.
So, running Vista is sooo much harder/more complex/less efficient/ than previous OSs that *more* people need to be hired?!? And that is a good thing how?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
As an employer, this does not sound like great news to me. Do they mean the EU economy as a whole will need 50,000 new sysadmin jobs just to keep people play Freecell and browse porn sites with Vista? This does not sound like a good reason for Vista adoption.
"A Lockheed Martin-sponsored study found that war for oil will be a boon to worldwide economy, as it 'will create more than 500.000 technology jobs in some middle-east countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for US companies working over there,' FakeNews.com reports. Noone will see a total of 1.2 mln dying civilists thanks to Fox..."
http://www.theproguy.com/
50,000 jobs at, say, $60,000 each = $3bn. That's $3bn on top of license fees. That's $3bn just to do what you can do already. That's not good. Of course, moving to Linux is hardly cheap on support, but there's no license fee. Seems to me that this would be an ideal time to switch (not that big companies will). Still - it's hilarious that papers will carry this sort of PR puffery from Microsoft without question.
How is Microsoft lowering TCO when one small continent will need over half a million more people just to keep Windoz running?
Sounds like one more piece of ammo for Linux, the BSDs, or even Apple.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
Unfortunately, each and every one of those 50,000 is a beta tester. Sounds like they won't be selling as many copies as they'd hoped. I wonder how many new "jobs" it'll create worldwide...
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
It's simply to facilitate "broken windows" fallacy jokes on a massive scale. Seriously, that's pretty much what this is. Yes, it might increase employment at some level, having to deal with the annoyances of windows vista. But so does me running round and smashing things. It's NOT desirable though.
Sadly, that's how economist think and work. The Exxon Valdez disaster, for example, was a boon to the US economy according to standard models of economics, because it created lots of jobs.
The reason for such silly conclusions is that large, unquantifiable costs are ignored. In the case of Vista, it will probably create lots of jobs (because it will be a lot of work to install and maintain), but those jobs will not be productive jobs--they don't contribute to what the companies using Vista actually are supposed to do.
In different words, a company producing widgets will still be producing widgets pretty much the same way after Vista has been installed, they'll just have sunk a boatload of money into migrating, retraining, licensing, and hardware upgrades. Furthermore, the computer specialists doing all that work are kept from doing something actually productive. As a result, the cost of widgets has gone up and the economy is worse off overall.
If this is how one creates jobs, one can create even more jobs if Europe switches to CP/M or IBM 370/155 or Cyber 170 NOS.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... 49.000 of these jobs will be as MCVR (Microsoft Certified Virus Remover) and MCSC (Microsoft Certified Spyware Cleaner-Upper).
So is this how much it will cost to switch from XP to Vista? Notice how we are not talking about costs to switch now, but how many jobs it will create?
How many jobs will it create to switch to Linux instead of Vista? Is it time to rewrite the TCO studies at the get-the-facts campaign?
)9TSS
Population count of europe? 6.5 billion? 50,000 some how doesn't seem like newsworthy stuff.
50 000 new lawyers to sue Microsoft?
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Discarding the sarcasm and addressing the core of your statement.... Microsoft simply did what every sane corporation would have done. They hired people who know how to whore for support from European politicians and one of the magic phrases in that competition is 'Creating high tech jobs in marginal constituencies'. One is simply left hoping that European politicians won't prostitute them selves as easily to Microsoft as they did when Lockheed bribed them to buy a study in military aviation mediocrity called the F-104 Starfighter which incidentally killed a string of pilots, not that that seemed to matter to any of the people involved. Now before you flame me for accusing Microsoft of being out to kill people with Windows Vista, I'm not, they are just out to make a buck by screwing the consumer with their monopoly. I took the Starfighter example to demonstrate how devoid of moral fiber European political weasels can be, not to flame Microsoft.
...Microsoft Support Center hires 50,000 new employees to get ready for the release of Vista.
Is vista really that hard to admin?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Assuming, of course, that the EU gets their way :-)
Meta will eat itself
"A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to European economy, as it 'will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there...,"
"A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be such a pain in the ass to install and support that it 'will create more than 50,000 IT support jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of complaints for companies there..."
AT&ROFLMAO
"Microsoft admits Vista is so broken, that another 650,000 people in Europe alone will be needed to keep it running."
Did nobody in Microsoft's PR department see that this is bad news of monstrous proportions? Were they really shouted down by people who think the public is gullible enough to believe the 'broken=good for the economy' spin? At a time when businesses like mine can see no benefit whatsoever to changing to Vista, I'm stunned that they didn't bury this story as deep as they could. There's something seriously wrong with a company that believes it's own hype to this extent.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Another study showed that getting rid of computers completely would create MILLIONS of jobs for something called "file clerks" and other information workers. Something called "stenaography" would blossom as a new field, and "typists" would be in high demand at EVERY company WORLDWIDE!
meh
for the companies that buy it.
The / at the end of your link makes it broken, at least in my browser. I removed the / and found the article. Worth the effort; thanks!
Obviously Microsoft just do not understand SUNK COSTS. Few people do. They think investing zillions into software automagically generates profits.
...
...
Thus the new way that companies now profit is....
- Buy Vista,
- Increase IT department
-
- Profit.
err no that doesn't make sense.
This makes as much sense as
- companies burning down buildings and then having construction companies increase staff to build new buildings.
- injuring staff and then having hospitals increase staff,
- start frivoulous lawsuits and have lawyers increase staff,
Or more simply...
- "insert act of stupidity here" and have "profession" in "relevant industry" increased
So in other words, given that they say that 20 percent of all IT employment will be Windows Vista-related in the first 12 months of deployment, this means existing projects would be affected
delaying deployment of actual REVENUE or efficiency software e.g. Sales, automation, stock control etc.
There is a different. Paying Microsoft for Vista is a capital cost and it is a SUNK COST written off quite quickly but the money would always be better spent on durable good like building, vehicles, industrial plant etc or giving it back to the company SHAREHOLDERS or the WORKERS !.
Microsoft are simply frikin bottom line parasites.
This looks to me like tying straws to the camel's legs so it won't break its back.
If it's going to be harder to develop for Vista than XP, will this finally be "enough is enough", to produce a critical mass surge to tip OSS over the top?
(Apple doesn't count. Replacing one lock-in vendor with another is silly.)
The preview word is Offenses. Has Microsoft committed enough?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Europe will see a total of 1.2 mln paychecks thanks to the new operating system
Can we have those EUR2.5M per day checks first?
Get on board and ALL OF YOU will make money!
It's not true since only the people at the top (or should I say bottom?) will make money, and the huge base will lose all it put in and the majority of the rest will lose more than they gain.
It's also not real since the money people and compagnies will put into vista will come from some other budget, so it means other IT companies and other economical sectors would lose as much as microsoft gain.
Just don't put money into somebody else project until you really need it, and don't give a cent more. Use your money for your own projects: that is inovation.
Thats like the car dealer investigating if thier car caused the crash.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Microsoft was threating to not ship Vista to europe if the EU didn't change policies to allow microsoft to continue to abuse their monopoly without issue.
Why should the EU care about not Vista not being shipped to them?
Apparent, because they will miss out on the possible 50,000 jobs it would create.
So the EU better hop to it and bend over for microsoft.
- Jesse McNelis
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
50K new jobs created by Vista launching in Europe, jobs to include lawyers, judges and clerks (all involved in suing MS for not complying with EU mandates against monopolies).
Microsoft to help create 50,000 positions for lawyers in the EU to sue them for Anti-Trust practices.
From 0 to drunk in $20
It appears that being a script kiddie or virus writer now constitutes working in a 'technology job'. Who'd have thought it?
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
It will be the same people who will do the support, they basically get re-trained. With all that need of training coming up you may see a shift from technical support to trainers (after they get their training).
I just happen to be one of the lucky few at my job that gets to go on a 4 weeks exposure to Vista. So some airline is getting a few more seats sold, some hotel owner gets to rent out a room and quiet a few bars and restaurants my expect me frequenting there for 4 weeks. But during those 4 weeks I am pretty sure that my local pub is going to miss out some income (I don't have a drinking problem, I support Microsoft products), but that will probably be compensated by my team that has to miss out on their Technical coach for 4 weeks and by day 2 they will be in the pub making the owner a nice increase of revenue (they don't have a drinking problem, they support Microsoft Products and they have to do it without their coach)
Then, after my return I need to re-deliver the training which will leave me off the floor for another 8 weeks to get everybody trained. By that time the pub owner is exstatic as there will be only half of the engineers available to take on support cases while the other half is in training. Then our customers start frequenting their local pubs more often becuase it will take twice as much time for us to get back to them. The pub owners counts the cash and sees his establishment filling to the brim and that is where the jobs come from, because he will need more staff to poor the drinks (keep them coming, we now support Vista as well)
Because the drop of customer satisfaction due of having only half of the engineers available, the managers are going to be spotted in the pub as well. The pub owner thinks he died and went to heaven.
Shortly after that we will see a revenue increase in detox clinics and treatment of liver cirrhoses. (the clinic is run by the pub owners brother)
So if you are looking to profit from the introduction of Vista, just open a pub realy close to a technical support center and you will be raking in the millions. If you are not the "run your own bussiness" type and looking for a job, it will be in bartending where you can make a career!
Supporting MS products doesn't mean you have to like them.
Vista creating jobs is a good thing. Or is it just a euphemism for reduced productivity?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
50,000 people are needed to debug and fix the broken vista once its out - wow! Guess it wasnt as bad as we thought...
, , , , , karma elon
Every public postbox should have, at its top, a nonleathal but poisonous plant with long, stringy and spiked whip-like tentacles. Occasionally if disturbed they would deliver bleeding cuts to passerbys.
This would generate jobs in:
- The entire plant supply chain, from growing to end-user delivery, and maintenance
- Plant behaviour prediction, both theoretical and with tangible products
- R&D of poison-counteracting drugs
- The sales of said drugs through retail staff, more of whom could be hired on the increased revenue.
- The revenue going to shopowners would be invested in the stockmarket and used to open more shops in rural areas that previously (pre-plant) were unsustainable.
- Protective clothing, marketing departments of protective clothing manufacturers, and corresponding R&D
- and really a lot other areas
It's a good idea really, but only if there's nothing better for them to do.
(Note: slightly tongue-in-cheek - with Vista the benefit of jobs is really on a tangent. As in, the "holy fucking crap shit" of 'we have to pay for this', is alleviated into 'wow this sucks, but at least someone gets jobs'. I just question whether maybe the perceived-nice situation of lots of profitable companies hiring and training large numbers of unemployed and disadvantaged people to update their IT systems will take place in practice).
Well, then the EU politicians should be told how many jobs will be created by completely switching to Linux. :-)
After all, this will be much more work (all Windows specific stuff will have to be rewritten for Linux), therefore it will create many more jobs. So it's obvious which way to go, isn't it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"A Terrorist-sponsored study found that terrorist attacks will be a boon to European economy, as it 'will create more than 50,000 security and rebuild jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there,' News.com reports. Europe will see a total of 1.2 mln paychecks thanks to the new operating system: 'In the six countries studied, more than 150,000 IT companies will produce, sell or distribute products or services countering terrorists attack in 2007 and will employ 400,000 people, IDC said. Another 650,000 will be employed in the security departments of businesses that rely on security measurements.'" :-) för humor impaired.
Just saying it like it are.
"You beter leave msft alone, you mean 'ol EU, you. If you stop msft's abusive business practises, then you will all lose your jobs, and be out begging in the streets. So there."
Silvio Berlusconi, previous Italy's prime minister, at time of his election promised a million of new workplaces... (=
I was expecting 1000 million jobs :(
Et alia.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
god how i despise these propagandistic manipulative bastards.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
So Vista's going to cost even *more* for businesses to use?
Yikes.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Apple just announced Leopard will create 100,000 Ballmers in Asia!
How many software companies will Vista kill? This sounds like a fallacy to me,
So Vista will cost companies 2.5 billion Euros (50k employers at 50k Euro/each)
How is spending an additional 2.5 Billion Euro a good thing?
Or did they do this to draw away from the 5 Billion (100k new jobs) later in the article.
That 5 Billion is money that can't be spent on other things, is it really a good idea to flaunt how much vista is going to cost us?
Releasing buggy and unstable software creates jobs. So this whole time, microsoft hasn't been evil, they've just been creating jobs, YAY MICROSOFT!!!
> A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to
> European economy, as it will create more than 50,000 technology jobs
Are they including the lawyers in that number?
Think of all the people needed to recode your stuff to work around the mandatory DRM, so your software keeps running!
Not to mention all the people who'll take up the challenge of being the first to whack DRM out of it so the spice flows again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If MS can sell that, I can advance my plan to replace PCs with offices full of Bob Cratchetts doing accounts with fountain pens and abacuses. I can create 5 million jobs overnight.
"The launch of Windows Vista will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries"
At an average salary of UK£30,000 that would mean Vista adding 1.5^52 or roughly UK£1.5 BILLION to the European economy. Thats US$2,823,734,500 DOLLARS. I don't think so.
"IDC believes that more than half of the gain in Windows-related employment will be specifically related to Windows Vista. It is growth that IDC believes would not occur were Windows Vista not in the market,"
I fail to see the logic. What will Vista bring to these companies that cannot be already done with Open Source solutions. Since when did an Operating System promote growth in an economy. For most companies its a negative on the balance sheet.
"Moreover, for every euro of revenue that Microsoft makes, companies within the IT ecosystem will, on average, make more than 13 euros, IDC found"
Does anyone really believe these numbers. Assuming a third party actually produces a big selling product. For each unit it sells it pays for another license. The revenue of which goes back up the pyramid.
Someone I know who produces drivers for medical diagnostic equipment tells me the company spends one fifth of its budget annually on software licenses alone. I asked why they don't move to Open Source. He replied that they were so tied to the one platform that it would be too disruptive to move. So here we have a company making vital strategic decisions based on what software vendor they buy from.
davecb5620@gmail.com
..don't mess with Vista or the MEP gets it..with a chair!
No but, yeah but, no but...
Jobs.
You just need to be asked to run small company with all bureaucracy done on paper with typewriter. Absolutely w/o computers. You would understand why the boom happened really: computer market stabilized, became commodity and business at large went from paper-based work flow to computer-based one. In fact, computers now allow small companies to increase business volumes: only because bureaucracy is magnitude cheaper now.
Are you trying to tell me that the average M$ shop is paperless? Hold on a second. ... OK, now I'm back from laughing and crying. Large companies have some rudiments of paper replacement. Small companies have simply been throwing their records away or still have paper files. The M$ monopoly has cost us all lots and lots of money.
At fortune 500 companies, pdf and tiff may indeed have replaced paper records, but M$ had nothing to do with it and the actual work is still done one paper. If the company is highly regulated, like a nuclear power plant, they might have called in IBM to make a document serving and saving system and that has marginally decreased total costs. IT costs, as a portion of the total budget did not change at all! Employees loath and distrust their M$ workstations to the point that they carry their actual work on floppies or USB fobs. The M$ "file servers" are even worse about keeping data. All of the work in progress is printed out and done with pen and paper. The results are laboriously typeset with M$ Word. This is not the office of the future.
Small businesses have it even worse. In one way they have an advantage, a lack of legacy systems to draw them down. The problem is that they do not trust the local IT people they can afford to move them into the future with free Unix derivatives. They could do it all with free software but M$ spends billions of dollars a year in FUD to keep them from doing that.
I'm old enough to have seen it all happen and am bitterly disappointed by the slow pace of change. Family members helped computerize medical records at a large regional hospital back in the 70s. They hooked up a terminal in his house back in the day Ma Bell rented people their phones. My first "real" computer was an IBM clone. I hooked a typewriter to it and used it to print my papers, mail and CAD in the 80s. That is the model still used by most companies. 25 years later all correspondence, records keeping, even scratch work, should be electronic but it's not.
The overriding problems for large and small businesses using M$ are poor GUI and poor reliability issues. A lack of virtual desktops forces printing of all real work in progress. If you can't spread it out on your computer, you have to spread it out on your desk. M$'s notorious lack of stability and "complex" file formats rules out their use for real records keeping. Even if the business is bright enough to waste money on Acrobat distiller, so that formatting issues go away, the underlying OS and file system lacks reliability. As noted, only large companies have spent the big bucks on document archive systems people believe in. I've written elsewhere about the way the combination of poor GUI and reliability ruins place keeping and wastes employee time on reboots every day. All of these issues are solved in free software.
The cost of all of this intentional waste may indeed produce hundreds of thousands of jobs. How else would Bill Gates have all his billions? The problem is that every penny spent is waste and we would all be better off if those people were making things that people want and need instead of endlessly running circles around broken equipment which has failed to deliver on it's promise for decades.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Another way to look at this news... Vista is going to create and additional 50,000 jobs' worth of additional expenses.
This is a good example of spin.
Wow...given what I've seen of Vista, Microsoft is wise to beef up their help desk like that! :)
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
So won't this be the same people already supporting Windows XP? (So no net gain in people)
Or are they saying that it's going to take 50,000 more people to support Vista than it did to support XP? Scary!
Screw a light bulb?
Vista will not CREATE I.T. jobs, it will mean companies need to hire 50,000 more employees to support it. I.T. is a COST CENTER in a company, not a center of profit. A common figure tossed around for the "fully weighted" cost of an I.T. employee (pay + benefits + facilities + management) is $130,000 US. It's just a placeholder, but tends to work for large scale budgeting.
Taking that number and multiplying it by these new jobs which are going to be required to support Vista, and you're draining 6.5 Billion (or "thousand million" for our non U.S. readers) U.S. Dollars.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This is Microsoft saying that they are good for the "people", but not good for "business". Any employer with even a bit of business sense will see this for what it is -- Microsoft's new product will make them pay more money for more people to do what their current employee base is already doing. This is the creation of redundant jobs.
This is a losing proposition for Microsoft among businesses that can say "no" to Vista and are not afraid of jumping ship to other, more cost effective computing solutions.
Is this the tipping point?
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
"Downgrading" to windows 2000. Or "downgrading" to Ubuntu. Or "downgrading" to OS X. Or "Downgrading" to SLED 10. Or "downgrading" to ZetaOS.
Really, there will be an endless supply of jobs for everyone. Oh, I just thought of a new one: "Downgrading" to a broken pile of rubble with your hammer.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
..... but I can't stop laughing !!
chown -R us
Is it just because it's a story about M$ sucking, or is it due to something else that just about EVERYONE is modded +5 Insightful. Where are the Trolls at? Who the hell is doing the modding and meta-modding?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Down with the fascist Microsoft! http://malfy.org/
Did you honestly think that the new minesweeper interface was going to support itself?
A hurricane hit the state of Louisiana, creating an estimated 100,000 new jobs. 99% of the jobs created were in the field of Re-Construction, the other 1% were estimated to be in the Legal field....
Neighbor state Mississippi is concerned that those 100,000 jobs are going to come from their labor pool, leaving them bereft of any Re-Construction laborers though they did say the lawyers and clerks will not be missed.
Alabama state said they were jealous as they hadn't seen that many new jobs created in the last decade... "Why can't a hurricane hit our state?"
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
It's already been pointed out by many people that for MS to be involved in anti - malware/spyware software development is a conflict of interest. GM cannot sell a car and then sell wheel retainers to keep the wheels from falling off if you hit a pothole. They have to make the wheels work right to begin with.
For MS to sell a product that fixes the faults in their principle product is a conflict of interest. They should be required to fix the original product, not allowed to double dip on the fix also.
"Another 650,000 will be employed in the IT departments of businesses that rely on Vista"
I wonder what that says about Vista TCO? It can't be good, surely.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
In order to support Vista, Microsoft will need to create 50000 new jobs : Advertizers for Vista products, support for Vista, ...
... makers for example) will also dissappear ?
But in the same time, they are removing support for previous versions... So, how many jobs lost for XP advertisement, 98/Me/2000/XP/2003 support (they won't keep as many people to support these "outdated OS"),...
And how many jobs in "competitors" (all anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall,
...all the jobs will be guards for the "relocation" camps to which those that violate Microsoft DRM will be sent.
Aw, geez, here comes another Flambait mod. Oh well.
I can't wait to tell them how we are going to have to hire more people to support Vista OS. WOW.
But it is probably the most truthfull thing microsoft has said in some time.
When I worked for a MS centric consulting group, I would argue that we should be using linux in some applications, because it was more reliable. The CEO would argue back that that is exactly why we shouldn't be putting linux there.
1) Customers accept defacto that MS products are the best answer.
2) They require support which is where our money was made.
3) The more versions, the more patches, the better.
As soon as MS recommended automatic patch updates, we were on it.
Yes sir, we installed MS in the recommended manner, but one of the latest patches broke your applications. Yes we could do this another way, but that would require that we test your apps with the patches before rollout. This will require that we reconfigure your servers (at a modest fee of course) and that we get paid to test each patch before rollout (monthly fee with contingency that we would get paid extra if testing went beyond their monthly quota).
We sometimes billed multiple clients for patch testing the same application. ( We felt like lawyers,(not that that's a bad thing))
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
Geek Squad is hiring 50,000 employees to prepare for Vista fallout
mod me funny
I doubt anyone on this board would contend that MS's craptacular software accounts for a massive segment of the IT sector. Without it, thousands of people could maintain their own computers with OS X.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
(http://crashrecovery.org/us-army-unix.jpg )
"It was also not by coincidence then that, in the same winter of 1994-95, McCoy revealed to me that he was using former Green Berets to conduct physical surveillance of the Washington, DC offices of Microsoft in connection with the PROMIS case. FTW has, within the last month, received information indicating that piracy of Microsoft products at the GE Aerospace Herndon facility were likely tied to larger objectives, possibly the total compromise of any Windows-based product. It is not by chance that most of the military and all of the intelligence agencies in the US now operate on UNIX or Macintosh systems."
Robert M. Stockmann
Does anyone else find it funny that after Microsoft's long campaign touting how Linux has a higher TCO than Windows, they are sponsoring a new study that says businesses will have to spend a ton more on IT staff to install and maintain Vista?
Never meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and good with catsup.
>> Vista 'will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries
...Which means another 50,000 call centre workers in Mumbai India.
Yep I ran Vista RC1 and switched back to XP after about 20 minutes. Its obvious the extra jobs are going to be created In tech. support.
I think you are correct on the cost side, a few years ago I've heard an estimate of 120,000 Euros/year/employee for the engineering company I worked for. Mostly academics and some moderately expensive hardware, so I think the cost of qualified IT employees might be lower but not by much.
;-)
Now this would be acceptable if Vista would seriously increase the productivity of the users. But according to all reviews of Vista I've read so far, it might be more of an impediment
C - the footgun of programming languages
I guess since Vista is so slow and buggy, companies will need more of us to keep the damn thing running. If I was in Europe, I guess I'd send MS a thank you note for keeping me employed even longer.
How do you sell something like that? Isnt IT supposed to be reducing workload?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Gang violence, drunk driving, and terrorism generate jobs in the health care industry
... Wal-Mart creates a few hundred jobs when they open somewhere as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Vista to Create 50,000 Jobs in Europe
Sounds like an army of IT workers supposed to assist Europe's migration to GNU/Linux...
compare:
populace (a noun -- note the nounish -ace ending, like in "grimace" or "terrace" or "surface") vs
populous (an adjective -- note the -ous ending, which hints that it's an adjective, just as in "obnoxious" or "presumptuous" or "vexacious", which you might use to describe people who correct spelling on slashdot)
HTH
So this means that if everbody migrates from Windows to Linux instead of upgrading to Vista, there won't be 50,000 new jobs, only (say) half of them? That must imply that Linux' Total Cost of Ownership is much lower... contrary to their own previous claims.
Selling crack also generates thousands of "jobs", but that doesn't mean it's a good thing, does it.
By the perception of illusion, we experience reality
I can't see how anyone would believe that more jobs will be created. What will happen are lateral moves. Sure there'll be a need to upgrade components to make the OS work at more than a snail's pace but those upgrades are one time things and will not be sustainable growth. Anyone taking even a simple unbiased look at Vista knows this. Vista is just WinXP with a new interface. The security updates could have been added to XP with a SP3. The look of the OS is all they have to sell this thing on. That's not enough. Vista ia pig with lipstick. Basing the sale of a non-necessary upgrade of the OS on the looks of it is litarally pulling the wool over our eyes.
There's no substantial reason to upgrade to Vista other than just to have the latest and greatest. Security could be a reason except that a SP3 could solve that and one must ask the question of whether Microsoft is going to hang XP users out high and dry if they don't upgrade. If they can I'm sure they'll get the Department of Homeland Security to tell everyone to upgrade just like they did with the service packs and patches--which did nothing more than get Microsoft's Genuine Advantage Notification Spyware program installed on their machine.
Any modification to the OS as far as the API goes has to be backwards compatible to XP. If not, then so many programs won't run and it will be a complete turn around of the way upgrades to Windows has been done in the past. The only reason to change that is due to them trying to force everyone to upgrade at the substantially higher price than XP.
Frankly, there's no need to upgrade. There's no compelling reason. All the stuff that was supposed to distinguish Vista from XP has been cut out. The interface change isn't enough. If you want your machine infected with Microsoft DRM madness that's your fault and your choice.
The jobs in Europe will be fleeting. There will be more lateral moves than anything as ppl simply switch jobs from supporting XP to supporting Vista, except you have to keep in mind that most everyone understands that there's nothing in Vista compelling enough to have ppl upgrade. The costs of upgrade for the OS is high (that'll drive people away) and the cost for upgrading their hardware is even more--even on machines less than 2 years old--and that'll drive people away. The upgrade path will be slow and you'll see alot of complaining when people realize they paid too much for nothing significant.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
"Microsoft sponsored study finds Microsoft products are good"
Someone's got to clean up the mess.
I do not like to have a "Vista" Job. No Thank's
My primary argument for a transition to Linux/OS X combination. "The Vista transition will require a substantial increase in IT workforce, and will be mandatory."
I love it.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
It's in today's entry which is right here.
chuk
It seems to me like just yesterday Microsoft was touting lower Total Cost of Ownership for their products and how running their products would allow fewer system administrators to do more. Now that Vista is coming out, they're talking about how many more people are going to be employed running their software? Huh? What's next? They're going to say, "Screw video games, we're getting into desktop publishing!" ????
> Vista will be a boon to European economy, as it 'will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there
At least it would have if the EU didn't fine Microsoft $1 million / day and caused Microsoft to say "Fcuk Europe" and not release Vista there.
Geezo, 50,000 support jobs. So MS is saying that it will cost the EU about five billion dollars a year to support Vista? Maybe the EU should rather switch to Linux.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
A related study, sponsored by myself, found that if monkeys were to come flying out my butt, this will be a boon to the European economy as it will create 'more than 50001 food supply, housing, cleaning and veterinarian jobs in seven large European countries'. Europe will see a total of 1.2e-6 paychecks thanks to the appearing monkeys: 'In the seven countries studied, less than 150,001 code monkeys will produce, sell and otherwise fling feces on the clear plates of glass surrounding them, I apparently said. Another 650,000 unlucky souls will be condemned to the IT departments of businesses that rely on the glass plates'.
The concept of the potlatch (conspicuous destruction of wealth to humiliate an opponent) has been around for ages and ages. It's not a new phenomenon as far as society goes, and not limited to any single culture. Though prior to 1999, people used IT as a tool to get work done and chose things other than IT costs for their pissing contests. e.g. lighting cigars that cost half an average slob's day's wage with hundred dollar bills
Things haven't gone back to normal fully yet: people are still talking about IT costs / per capita IT expenditures / etc. rather than about how effective those expenditures are.
Why not ask for a product recall the next time a single businesses product causes your online banking to go tits up for a day and a half? Or when air traffic is shut down for hours over the most populace state in the country? Or when you and no one else in the airport can get a boarding pass printed?
Those are rhetorical questions. The answer to "why not?" is that what's pawned off as IT these days *cough*MS*cough* is not about getting work done but about budgetary and staffing level pissing contests, and occasionally plain ideology: voting with their wallet for the legend of Bill.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Of course, Microsoft neeeds the money to buy more chairs for Steve to throw.
then he really will not buy vista...
It's the same window-breaking economy that fuels this entire discussion: in selling Vista for upgrade, the extra hassle may create as many as 50,000 jobs; in making a terrible product that requires additional software to secure it, there are more people involved in creating and maintaining Microsoft's software. I take that as the sure sign that the Emperor is about to parade in some New Clothes.
"These aren't the job's you're looking for."
Vista probably will create quit a few jobs. I mean, just look at how many people make a living writing anti-spyware and anti-virus software for XP! The only reasons Vista will create jobs, IMHO, is because somebody will have to fix what should have been made right in the first place. (And of course the usual minor things any OS migration has, transfering personal files, helping businesses adapt, etc).
Don't get me wrong, windows did a good thing in bringing computers into the average home, but I personally don't thing a user base benefits too much from a homogenous OS, even if it were completely bug free. Lack of competition slows things down for everybody. Just look how far projects such as GNOME and KDE have come in such a short while, probably largely becuase they're forced to compete to some degree. But I suppose when you have a virtual monopoly, you wouldn't want to do any real work anyway, assuming you can manage to keep a paycheck riding the 'windows tax'.
...yell about how expensive a change to Linux would be ? They mentioned that there would be a massive need for education of useres and rewriting of applications ?
I just imagined the new title "Microsoft says that a change to Linux would create at least 50,000 jobs in Europe, 50,000 in the United States and another 200,000 in the rest of the world."
I hope some politicians from around the world sees this... Al Gore, where are you when the world need you ?
--
I do have a wired imagination...
I thought computers where suppose to make like easier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_(Middle-earth)
Vista part of the atmosphere that surrounds the world of Arda before the cataclysm at the end of the Second Age.
All those jobs are created because there will be a need for tech support when Vista starts breaking all over the place.
As a tech/sysadmin, I like the fact that Windows breaks so much. It gives me job security.
/* No Comment */
The singularity is coming. Microsoft won't be around then. We'll know all the code that we run after we become cyborgs. And later, jupiter brains.
Original: "will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there"
Translation: "We're dumb enough to think that fake positive publicity pressure tricks that work in the USA will work in the EU"
This activity occurs at the expense of what?
Boy, did you hit the nail on the head. This reminds me of US Senator Clinton (D-NY) trumpeting the fact that her office had helped land a Tata Consultancy Services office in Buffalo. While we can argue over the long term effects, I posted a note on her website pointing out that the short term effect was that she was adding 50 American faces to a business based on moving technical jobs away from her constituents. If Tata didn't suceed in outsourcing several times more American FTEs than they employed in Buffalo, that office would soon shut its doors.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Anything they can make hit the news will be repeated mindlessly by a million of non-critical readers around the Europe. Plus a million of headlines-only readers. Plus three millions of "I heard it somewhere" people. What they are actually getting to by that we can speculate only, but here are a few ideas:
If I was in the Bush family, I could pass nuclear physics by pissing out the window in the morning, or are you trying to claim that the Shrub got where he has without the help of family and friends in high places?
5,000 support staff to work around the extra bugs 5,000 hackers to remove the DRM and registration requirements 40,000 lawyers