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Microsoft Unveils "Elevate America"
nandemoari writes "In response to the current economic crisis, Microsoft Corp. has come out with a stimulus plan of their own. Their goal is to help a large group of individuals use their computers to land employment in ways other than to generate a compelling resume. The new online initiative, Elevate America, is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in the field of technology."
It's a trap.
That's great, but aren't there already more people equipped with computer skills than the market needs? America doesn't need more job-qualified people (at least, that's not the big problem), it needs jobs to put those people in to.
Whale
Microsoft is just grabbing the opportunity to train more devs and IT in advanced Microsoft products. After all, this is what ensures that companies use these products; that way, the companies don't have to pay for training.
They also use this tactic with student/academia discounts, also.... (MSDNAA, anyone?)
As it is, the problem isn't a lack of qualified individuals, but rather a lack of jobs for them. On the face of it, this looks like a complete failure of an idea. But they have a secret. You see, they will teach people to use only Microsoft technologies, and if everything goes right, these people will be unemployable in an IT environment. When the number of qualified IT people is lowered to the number of jobs, success!
At first, I was going to post about not berating Microsoft blindly. Then I RTFA... They have basic courses for free online, but anything past that is an advertisement for MS certs.
Can step #1 be teaching everybody in my office that Caps lock is not the same as shift?
Also that you need to turn on num-lock to use the numpad?
Seriously...what ever happened to requiring basic computer skills to get an office job?
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Will Microsoft also be relocating those 2 million people to India so they can actually find jobs with their new skills?
i see no Cisco training, Apache, MySql, etc
but i do see training on Server2008 (woopee do)
this is just a fluff/feelgood PR initative, when really they want 2 millon mcse's/advocates/salespeople who only know about a single vendors product and are therefore ill equipped for the modern diverse IT industry.
there is more to IT than MS and a Mcse
Nigerian "Princes" have been using their computers to generate income for themselves for years now...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
... and install SilverLight!
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who reads this as "brace yourself for 2 million more unemployed MSCE's to dilute the IT field within the next 3 years". Sorry for the cynicism, but I see this as Microsoft trying to raise a generation of tech users and admins who know nothing of the tech world beyond Windows.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Cause I'm having a hard time justifying a $200 OS for my $300 laptop ... at least in the Real America that most of us live in.
Oh, and no takebacks on the Elevation, like they did with the firings of their staff and the pay they "overpaid" ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Oh, so they'll be teaching them how to manage systems running real operating systems like AIX, Solaris, *BSD, and various flavors of Linux. Neat.
This is a good strategy for MS, much like what Apple had with school districts - teach as many people in ways that make them dependent on your proprietary technology as you can, and call it a public service.
In my opinion, the underlying problem in this economy is thus: The rich portion of the populace owns about as much as is possible before the economy collapses. Our market is based on speculation and expectation setting - on growth of money making schemes. But what happens when the players looking to take more resources run out of easy resources to grab? Collapse.
The poorer 3/4 of the country have spent about all they are going to spend, and have gone in about as deep a debt as is plasible. It no longer makes sense to lend more money, or leverage more resources in hopes of getting return from that process. The owning class already has already extracted as many resources as they easily can, and it would take death on the part of the poorest folks to free any more resources to grab.
The only way left to continue the desired cycle and free up credit would be to take resources from the rich, and give it to folks who would actually spend those resources in the process of just living day to day, which would open up the credit markets again, increase demand for products, and so on.
But we've seen what outrage occurs when that happens - the whole point of the market for the larger players is to extract more resources, not give money to the "undeserving!" So, we get schemes like those from Microsoft - push for further ownership of mindshare, and call it charity.
Ryan Fenton
Or turn blue and spit out gobs of garbage
"...The new online initiative, Elevate America, is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in the field of technology."
This would have been better and on point:
"...The new online initiative, Elevate America, is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in using Microsoft technologies to perpetuate their proliferation while increasing dependence on such technologies at the same time."
It should read, "... is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in the field of Microsoft technology."
First off, of course computer sales are in a slump. They were in a slump during the last big economic downturn, too. (Remember the "bubble"?) That doesn't mean much of anything.
Second: Microsoft's slump is probably due more to peoples' general (and increasing) dissatisfaction with Microsoft than anything else. But the economy will hurt them, too. Maybe a lot. After all, a 5-year-old PC can run Linux just fine. But try Vista on it. Nope, didn't think so.
I would be willing to bet that Microsoft's slump lasts longer than any slump for Intel or AMD or Google.
And IBM? Who cares? When was the last time YOU bought something from IBM?
So they wan to help laid off workers, just not their own laid off workers?
Microsoft Bungles Severance, Asks Laid Off Workers for Money Back
How Microsoft-esque
Some areas have large surpluses, others have large deficits. One area I'm familiar with with a deficit is anything to do with data analysis, due to the huge piles of data companies like Google and Facebook are building up that they don't do nearly as much with as they could. If you can convince a company that you're both technically competent when it comes to data mining, machine learning, etc., and have knowledge in some area that relates to something to do with it (marketing/customer stuff, artificial intelligence, even just information visualization), there are plenty of jobs.
Actually, in general, the best bet seems to be to have two useful skill areas that intersect in some reasonable way; really cuts down the competition as compared to going up against people in one area or the other in isolation.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Stupid UAC, look what it's come to. Now we have to elevate the entire COUNTRY just to make Vista usable.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Elevate America has two main offerings, one available immediately and one that will be provided in partnership with state governments
Translation: MS will get money earmarked for retraining programs in order to flood the market with MS trained workers, depressing the wages of the latter and making their "TCO" so much more attractive.
You have to admire a company that is able to screw us coming and going.
Don't worry! Our MCSA will solve all your problems!
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
But didn't Microsoft just cut their workforce? http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11561
I am sure it wasn't all in the US, but still one hand saying hey lets help American workers get the skills they need to get a job, and then cutting thousands of workers seems to be a bit conflicting in their messaging...
2 million more arrogant pricks who don't know what they're doing.
There, fixed that for you.
I think some /.ers miss the point when they suggest this is about selling MS software. This is not about increasing MS revenue by selling more software, this is about increasing MS revenue by selling courses and certifications.
I am so pissed with MS lately, after Bill left they switched over from "certifying qualified people to support their products" to "selling certifications". Red Hat and Cisco certs are the way to go, they do a better job of testing real world experience, Red Hat being the best.
For the record I have the following certs, MCP, MCTS, MCITP: Enterprise Adminstrator, MCSA, MCSA: Messaging, MCSE, MCSE: Messaging.
Respect the Constitution
If you're going to be a xenophobe, you might as well come out and say it, rather than blaming all of our economic woes on foreigners.
The number of H1B workers is a drop in the bucket in the context of the national economy.
The number of H1-B visas that can be issued in a given year is limited to 65,000 by law.
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the total size of the American workforce was approximately 153.7 million last month (with unemployment at a troubling 11.6 million).
An H1B worker is typically limited to a 6-year stay, unless the worker is applying for permanent residency. Assuming that all 65,000 workers stay each year, we have 390,000 H1B workers in the country at the present (I'd guess the actual number is somewhat less than that).
At the very worst, H1-Bs might represent 0.25% of the national workforce.
Microsoft employs 3,517 H1-B workers (the 3rd most of any American firm), out of 89,809 total employees, or just about 4%. This number might be a little high, although 4 percent doesn't strike me as being particularly alarming.
Microsoft's recent round of layoffs (the first in the company's history) let go about 5,000 workers. Although I suppose these could have largely been avoided by eliminating all of the H1-B workers, that still leaves 1,500 workers, and assumes that every single H1-B worker was worthless to the company (which is somewhat doubtful).
To summarize: Stop complaining about the H1-B workers. Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession, the current crop of H1-B workers is simply too small to be having any substantial effect on the economy.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Bullshit.
Most interesting jobs are for people who can drive any car - whether it's a Toyota or a Renault.
We're a 50-50 linux shop (a big bank), and if you "I DON'T DO WINDOWS", we regard you as the same dogmatic crowd as "I'M SCARED OF LINUX, IT HAS A COMMAND LINE". The clueless crowd we don't hire.
If you're a professional systems engineer, you can manage anything (and code and script on it).
If you're dogmatic about a product, you're putting your religious beliefs (those that tack 'good' and 'evil' labels on things such as Microsoft, GNU or the open-source community) before the interests of your employer, and we wouldn't touch you with a 10-meter pole.
Best advice I can give is be ambivalent - get the fact you're a techie across. If you can sell yourself as an a-religious techie, you'll be in more demand.
Make a potential employer understand you'll do what is best for him, and you won't let your decisions for him be dictated either by your fear of one thing or religious dogma favoring the other.
-
Several posters have mused that Microsoft's strategy is to flood the market with MSCEs and grow the market for themselves.
My general impression is that we've been hearing about organizations switching to Open Source solutions during the economic downturn due to lower costs.
Could this be Microsoft feeling threatened and reacting by counter-attacking?
Microsoft *is* big and is not going to die soon, that much is certain. But what's important is whether the trend is going up or down, and by how much. Being big just helps you control that (to some extent).
I think the OP was suggesting that you create your CV full of Linux skills, and then watch as the recruiters direct you to Linux jobs.
If you have, say, AS/400 mentioned once, as an aside, in a small paragraph, using a tiny font, as a insignificant part of your first job, that you never even touched but the company once had an AS/400, I can guarantee you will get recruiters calling about whether your AS/400 skills are up to date enough to be a sysadmin!
Remove all traces of MS from your CV and you will get only interesting jobs - embedded, mobile, Linux. You won't get called for the crowd of MS vb.net jobs that are out there. You don't have to mention anything about hating Microsoft either! (and you get bonus points when you turn up to the interview and can do Windows too).
You don't think Minesweeper and Solitaire are going to play themselves, do you?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's time the geek stopped wallowing in his own FUD.
The Acer XP laptop with an Atom CPU, a 9" screen, 1 GB RAM and a 160 GB HDD is $298 at Walmart.com.
In six months to a year the OS will be Win 7, the specs significantly better, and the price will still be cheaper than OEM Linux.
The lone Linux netbook?
A Dell Inspiron with 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of Flash for $350.
"Not sold in stores."
... (a big bank) ...
See, I told ya it always work. It just filters out unwanted jobs, and lets you focus on the interesting ones.
How does one get the temperature below 0 degrees Kelvin?
When jokes fly above the heads of unsuspecting slashdotters, the ensuing endothermic reaction has been shown to lower temperatures past 0 degrees K.
The "woosh"-ing sound means it's working!
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Gates: Elevate me!
Ballmer: Now? Right here?
Seems to me that ms wants to suckle money from the Stimulus Package by giving false hope to tens of thousands of people who already have enormous competition from hundreds of thousands of already- ms-certified techhies out there who DO NOT need the extra competition, but who will suffer from the lower pay expectations of the newcomers.
Sounds like a quasi reach-around. People wanting to get into tech jobs can already go to local city/county/state offered programs. But, in making this "levitate/satiate/simulate Amerca" pitch of theirs, they probably hope someone in the Obama administration is green (or dumb) enough to say, "Hey, lets give ms some of that money and let them decide how to dole out the vouchers...." Only thing is is that ms as SURELy would love to get the money, and put the vouchers down to the lowers dollar amount they can get away with.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"