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.'"

Comments

This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Gives a whole new meaning to the "Broken Windows" fallacy of economics.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

In case folks don't see why this is funny:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken _window/

That's like saying...

[Saven Marek]

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.

Re:That's like saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what those 50000 are doing at the moment? Wandering the fields, looking at trees? Maybe, just _maybe_ they're supporting XP? Well, in that case, I say that 50000 jobs will be lost when Microsoft ships Vista, because of the decreased need for XP support.

On the downside ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Thats it?

[Lordpidey]

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)

But how does announcing this help their business?

[hakubi]

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.

Broken window falacy of economic activity

[Realistic_Dragon]

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.

Re:Obviously bollocks

[nwbvt]

Not necessarily. If it is harder to develop applications for or maintain Vista than XP, then jobs will be created. Of course, generally you want your new product to increase worker efficiency, not decrease it...