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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.
and counselling for IT personnel who have had nervous breakdowns
...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.
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.