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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.
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.
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.
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
Does the study state the decline in jobs for XP related positions? I think it evens itself out in the end...
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.
...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.
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.
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?
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
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!
I do assume, if the study is true, that European copies of Vista won't be including Windows Media Player.
You assume wrong.
The Media Player thing didn't result in Microsoft being forced to flog XP without Media Player in the EU. However, they are obliged to make a version without Media Player available. Nobody else, however is obliged to buy it.
OEMs, not much liking the idea of customers complaining that "Joe down the road just bought a new PC from (some other major OEM), and HE got media player!" for the sake of saving approximately zero, have stayed away in droves.
I supsect this is what the "15 different versions of Vista!" is probably about. Not just to fragment the market so people who are prepared to pay more do so, but also so that if they are taken to court again, they can stand up and say "Your honour, in the current version of our operating system thare are various options available with significant variations on what software is bundled. It's hardly our fault if every OEM on the planet is only selling one or two."
Eep! I should have known better than to post at 8:05 am.
Where's the edit button.....
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
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?
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.
Vista to Create 50,000 Jobs in Europe
Sounds like an army of IT workers supposed to assist Europe's migration to GNU/Linux...
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
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?