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Microsoft Employees Love Their iPhones

Posted by timothy on from the can-I-expense-this? dept.

portscan writes "There is an entertaining and telling article in the Wall Street Journal about iPhone use by Microsoft employees. Apparently, despite it being frowned upon by senior management, iPhone use is rampant among the Redmond rank and file. The head of Microsoft's mobile division tried to explain it away as employees wanting 'to better understand the competition,' although few believe this. Nowhere does the article mention attempts by the company to understand why the iPhone is more attractive to much of Microsoft's tech-savvy workforce than the company's own products."

4 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Same thing with iPods by Miandrital · · Score: 4, Informative

    I remember this same story came out about how a growing number of MS employees were using ipods, and apparently it was frowned upon, so they started switching the white headphones for regular ones. Link: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2005/02/66460

  2. Re:I loves and hateses my Preciousss by pcolaman · · Score: 3, Informative

    That was common with Verizon, but not so much anymore. My Droid does not have any features noticeably locked, and I'd easily argue that it's a much more open platform than the iPhone. Better? Debatable. But certainly more open.

  3. The google route. by mjwx · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm glad that Apple strictly controls what goes into the App-store, because I have no time at all to do a line-by-line source-code audit of every god-damn silly app I download.

    Why should they even need to?

    I cant fathom why you would think that such a thing is logically a good thing to do.

    The problem Apple has is not that it restricts the app store, that is fine as it is Apple's app store. The problem is that Apple restricts the iphone to the app store and the app store only.

    Google's way around this was to add an option into Android that permitted the installation of programs from anonymous sources and leave this option disabled by default. Therefore if you liked the kind of walled garden security that application restriction provides then you can have it, but if you wanted freedom it was three clicks away. But this kind of approach requires device level security, which the iphone has little to none of.

    --
    Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  4. Linux ACPI support... no thanks to Microsoft. by dclozier · · Score: 4, Informative

    From: Bill Gates
    Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
    To: Jeff Westorinon; Ben Fathi
    Cc: Carl Stork; Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
    Subject: ACPI extensions

    One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

    It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

    Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

    Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

    Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

    Linux ACPI support would probably be even better than it is now were it not for Microsoft.
    http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2010011422570951