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Microsoft Employees Love Their iPhones
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."
I have a love/hate relationship with my iPhone. My preciousss. It's pretty and seductive, but it locks me out of stuff. For just about everything, there's an app for that, except for when Apple pulled it. It can do just about everything, but not when Apple or AT&T says it can't, like tethering. But for all it makes me crazy, I still can't seem to pause in the middle of the day without pulling it from its holster and stroking its sleek, responsive, beautiful face for a few minutes.
Damn this stupid phone. I really should throw it back into the depths of Cupertino from whence it came, but you'd probably have to gnaw my hand off to get me to drop it.
John
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
And I can't think of any employee, at any time, who used a Windows Mobile handset for one second longer than was contractually required. It looks like they're finally getting the idea with the newest version that mobiles are not just small desktops, but all they've done is caught on to what everyone else figured out 10 years ago.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I wonder how many Apple employees use Microsoft Office. Or Microsoft employees search with Google. Why are people so intent on declaring one product the winner that everybody should use? Did it benefit Microsoft to switch Hotmail to MS IIS before IIS was ready to handle a site of that scale? This isn't a failure for Microsoft's phone efforts as much as it is a victory against Microsoft's mono-culture mindset.
It works with Exchange. Microsoft is not going to run a BES. And Android is the one eating their lunch.
So Microsoft says they believe it helps them to understand the competition, but the submitter simply says "nobody believes this" and then faults microsoft for not "trying to understand the competition"? Did people actually stop reading their own submissions?
Fleur de Sel
I don't understand how a company as huge and powerful as Microsoft can't release a good competitor for the iPhone. I have a Zune, and the hardware is quite nice, but the software is horrible and has given me a BSOD on three separate computers (with different versions of Windows).
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
If they do, then there's a real issue there.
If not, it's the employees money to do with what they please. Upper management needs to STFU.
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
The Apple culture is about obsession. This goes from creation to use. Despite any flaws the iPhone it has, it feels likes someone actually thought how non-engineers would use it. This is an important factor IMHO, because even with the 'wow' factor, a device will only work if people can find it usable. Too many gadgets, IMHO, are designed by engineers and almost feel like the primary user was an engineer. To many people the "it just works" element is as important as any of the features that the device it may include.
There are other companies who have understood the people factor, but all to often it doesn't feel like it is running through the veins of the companies.
Looking at Microsoft, I feel that they are confused about what it means be user friendly. There are elements of the company who seem to get it, while there are other parts that thinks bells and whistles are what user friendly is about. For me being user friendly is something a little complex, it is that right balance of simplicity and richness of functionality. Hiding features or dumbing down an application is not going to magically solve the problem, if the humans factor is forgotten in the process.
The irony in all this is that Apple spends less on R&D than Microsoft, yet whether it is through focused R&D or some other factor I feel they seem to capture the magic combination better. Maybe there is something to be said of having a company run by a guy who is so obsessive that his passion captivates people, rather than alienating them - yes, I am insinuating that Balmer's passion at developer conferences is more an after thought than something that drives the company in a cohesive way.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
This is why I am less and less happy about Apple's desire to end jailbreaking.
Opening up the iPhone allows me to be liberated from some of Apple's control-fetish annoyances.
Admittedly nothing that is "a deal breaker", but it does allow you to fix a few issues that just make the iPhone work "better", based upon your (not Jobs') definition of better.
Microsoft has a tech-savvy workforce! It's about time.
That's funny, you'd expect a lot of them would be using that really popular windows mobile phone, you know, the....err....wait, don't tell me...hmmm
Windows Mobile 7 is going to have to be really good to make up for the crap I dealt with on my last Windows based phone. Sure it looks like they've improved the god awful interface but if it's just as buggy and still under performs like my Orange SPV M3100 did then it won't have a chance imo.
We'll see how well they do but until people start using it on a day-to-day basis and feedback positively I'm not going to take anyone's opinion on it seriously.
I'm still not entirely sold on the interface. It is much slicker and isn't trying to replicate Windows on a phone but why can't they just make something that fits the screen rather than making it almost certain I'll have to scroll left and right to find everything and what is the point of making a heading to a section, like People, so big that it's guaranteed not to fit on the screen ever? Again, it looks nice but I can see that getting annoying over time and it reeks of being a lazy solution to making things look nice on various screen resolutions.
You mean, like they bought Sony or Nintendo instead of coming out with their own game console?
I agree. My iPhone would be much less useful to me without jailbreaking, and would limit its usefulness. Besides the points you made, I can do other things thanks to jailbreaking, like:
* Multitask
* Run WiFi only apps over 3G
* Run any non-approved applications I want
* Use multiple ActiveSync accounts (ie Work Exchange and Gmail)
* Use the iPhone as a storage device
Like you said, they might not be dealbreakers, and I understand the reason Apple doesn't want me to do some of them, but jailbreaking would be sorely missed.
It's too bad Apple can't just make a "no warranties, do at your own risk" official jailbreak for advanced users. I'll gladly take the risk, and I'm sure most users wouldn't even be aware of it.
It doesn't really seem like a fair comparison to me. Microsoft doesn't make phones, they make software. This isn't really news at all, just more "We found a trend at Microsoft, lets post a news article about it!" crud. Call me when Microsoft makes a phone that most Microsoft employees refuse to use, then I might consider it newsworthy.
Believe it or not, Microsoft is a pretty tolerant company on the inside. You're not required to drink the kool-aid, and using non-Microosft products and services is not frowned upon. Almost everyone (at least in Redmond) uses Google for search, for instance. A lot of smartphone users use iPhone. Some use Android even (even though corp discounts obviously don't apply to either iPhone or Android plans or phones). It is not uncommon to see a Mac running Mac OS X, even though the corp network doesn't really support it. I haven't seen any Linux use on laptops, but that's probably because ACPI support in Linux sucks ass.
There are folks who proudly drink the Kool-Aid, and refuse to use anything non-Microsoft, of course, but they're in minority.
Having worked elsewhere after Microsoft, I've gained a lot of respect for this aspect of Microsoft corporate culture that I had taken for granted. I think at least someone at Microsoft understands that Microsoft has a lot to learn from the rest of the world, and corporate inbreeding is its worst possible enemy.
I contend that for your average ACPI non-expert (99.999% of the population), it seems to be the other way around. I don't care who's wrong, I just want to my laptop to fucking wake up when I open the lid, like it does in Mac OS X and Windows.
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.
Most likely, that's because Microsoft doesn't make a phone.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Another famous example of corporate inbreeding is the taboo against American auto workers driving Japanese cars. I think this taboo had a lot to do with why Detroit lost so much ground to the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s. Without the direct, everyday experience of comparing the quality of the cars they were building to those from Honda and Toyota, they just couldn't understand how far behind they really were and what was going to be needed to catch up. The truth is, GM and Ford management should have purchased Japanese cars themselves, given them away by lottery to 10% or 20% of their employees, and required those employees to drive them to work every day!
People need to get over their high-school-loyalty mindset and realize that having at least some employees familiar with the competition's product is critical.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
I work for a large consumer products company, and our sector is pretty competitive. If the marketers would come over to IT and see us using competitors products, they'd be pretty pissed. We're all part of one team, and sticking to our products is important to us. I think that's one reason why we're successful. We do have competitors products on our desks / shelves but only to learn from / motivate us to gain more share. I have a hard time using products from our competitors... even in segments that we don't compete in... who wants to give the enemy more ammo?
I have had phones that came with huge manuals on how to use them. Apple made a phone that pretty much came with a leaflet, and said "Go on, see if you can't figure it out". Once you learnt how to pinch and slide your finger across the screen, you could do anything with the phone. The iPhone's paradigm has pretty quickly become the standard touch screen phone paradigm since then, yet touch screen phones existed for a long time before Apple decided to make one.
Right. In which case you then go speak to the hardware manufacturers and request they write proper Linux drivers for ACPI, or publish their hardware specs properly so the kernel developers can write the drivers.
Countless people went and done that, and what good did it do?
The real solution to his problem - the one that, you know, actually solves his problem, here and now - is the one that he gave himself: use a laptop with OS that can do it with the hardware that exists today. Not chasing unicorns.
By the same logic, it would be perfectly okay for me to call my kid an idiot for not knowing what year the Battle Of Hastings was, even though he's never done anything about it in his history class!
Well, if every single one of his classmates somehow knew that regardless...
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.
The reason Apple fights jailbreaking is simple: They have realized that their most important asset is their brand, and they will do anything to protect it.
Why does this relate to jailbreaking? Well, remember when all those jailbroken iPhones got rickrolled a few months ago? If you read the media coverage, in most cases the detail got lost that it only concerned jailbroken phones with a badly configured sshd on them. It made Apple look bad because iPhones could be rickrolled. That's the kind of news Apple is fighting, and until you can make certain that those kinds of things do not happen on jailbroken iPhones, Apple will keep fighting it out of fear of bad publicity.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
No, it's like calling your kid an idiot if, when asked to research the year of the Battle of Hastings, he writes a letter to the publisher of his favourite history textbook demanding that they email to all customers an errata footnote on the year that the battle of hastings occurred. When there's another free (as in beer -- Microsoft employees can install Windows on their work machines for free, obviously, and this is where the analogy came from) history textbook sitting right beside that has it listed and indexed already. Because he doesn't like the other history textbook.
It's not Linux's fault, per se, but it is Linux's problem. The difference between "Linux doesn't have good ACPI support" and "ACPI hardware doesn't have good Linux support" is pedantic and ultimately irrelevant to anybody not in a position to fix it themselves.
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
I may be on the fringe here, but I like my windows mobile phone..always have.
Windows mobile and the iphone each cater to a different class of user. iPhone undoubtably caters to the larger class, the media-hungry chic consumer. Microsoft to the smaller, corporate minded consumer. For the purpose of comparison we'll call the iphone class, class 1, and the corporate class, class 2. Yes the iPhone has a great UI, no denying that. They're design is sleek and clean. It's beautiful.
Now if microsoft can just add on a UI and app store geared toward class 1 they'd be fine. Personally, i'd be happy if they had 2 UI themes. The first defaulting to class 1 and the 2nd to class 2 and letting me choose between the two with ease.
I don't think they should force themselves to reinvent the wheel here. Look, the iPhone interface works.They have a lot of information on what works. Do that. Forget about the criticism you'll get from making your UI iPhone like, being a copy-cat or whatever.
I'm squarely in class 2 of users. I'm an IT guy. I love running apps in the background. My VPN app is designed for windows mobile. I love tethering, and I actually love the interface. Email on the main screen, check. Calendar there, check. Battery level, check. Remote desktop, ssh, check. Anything that doesn't have those things for me as an IT guy gets chucked.
Next phone, HTC Touch HD2, it's a no-brainer for me. There's no viable alternatives.
On a side note, i was considering an iPad. Love the discounted 3G plan (let's face it, t-mobile and verizon's $60 mobile broadband plans are WAY overpriced).
Love the form factor, size, no physical keyboard, just what i wanted for mobile IT administration. But then, no multitasking, no VPN for me, once again, it gets chucked. The day there's a viable windows based tablet (e.g. HP slate), i'm there.
-Tony
I commute between Seattle and Redmond on the #545 bus used mostly by Microsoft employees and contractors. Often I notice that most of the passengers are using their cell phones during the bus ride. My guess is that looking around the bus gives me a pretty good sense of what phones are popular on the MS campus. Yes, many many iPhones. More iPhones than Windows Mobile phones. I notice some people have both a Windows Mobile phone and an iPhone. I am starting the see lots of Android phones however. It will be interesting to see what happens when Windows Mobile 7 comes out.
Of course there is lots of non-MS software which is used extensively at Microsoft. Labview, Matlab, and JMP are all used a great deal because there are no real MS equivalents. I've never noticed any non-Office productivity suites being used by my coworkers, but that is probably because Office works well enough, and the latest version is always available for employees.
Why in the world would you want to run GMail over activesync? IMAP with idle works great for my gmail account.
Um, because ActiveSync uses real push (via formatted SMS notifications) and IMAP IDLE just requires a constant data connection chewing your battery?
I don't own an iPhone; I thought that was just common knowledge (how EAS worked).
If you go to a deaker, all the employees will drive their own brand. And if you got a production plant, the vast majority of the cars will be of the brand produced there. Yes of course there are exceptions, you will see plenty of other cars brands outside the Ferrari plant. But if you work at Ford, you drive ford. And nobody at DAF would consider using anything but DAF trucks for their own company.
Since MS employees are highly likely to get a discount on MS products it is extremely telling that it can't even sell its own dog food to its own employees.
It just doesn't send the right message. You wouldn't think it normal if the vast majority of MS employees used Mac's would you?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.