Microsoft Barring Certain Staff From Buying Macs, iPads?

mr100percent writes "Microsoft has reportedly moved to prohibit employees in its Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, and Operations Group (SMSG) from using company funds to purchase any products produced by Apple. The company had already barred staffers from using expense allocations for competing smartphone platforms, however the new guidelines explicitly note that Macs and iPads have been added to the list. 'Within SMSG we are putting in place a new policy that says that Apple products (Mac & iPad) should not be purchased with company funds,' an alleged letter distributed to staff reads."

Comments

Barring?

[bananaquackmoo]

Barring and "should not be purchased with company funds" are two entirely different things.

Re:Barring?

[Skapare]

This only says not to buy those things with company money. IOW, Microsoft doesn't want its own company money to be supporting Apple and other competitors. It is not applicable for staff buying them for personal use.

Any company is perfectly within their rights to specify how the company money is spent.

Re:Barring?

[Anonymous Coward]

More to the point, Microsoft has always tried (AFAIK) to eat its own dogfood, so this seems to be simply an extension of that as opposed to any particular malice.

Re:Barring?

[cpu6502]

This is more than just money..... it's selling to the customer. Wouldn't it look bad if a Microsoft employee came to your company to demo a new product, and they whipped-out their Apple Macbook to give the presentation? Or even less obvious... the MS presenter spends the lunchbreak listening to an iPod. It sends the wrong message that "Yeah I work for Microsoft but I really prefer Apple."

Telling sales staff to not buy Apple (and instead use Microsoft products as frequently as possible), is the same as a store giving employees 40% off if they buy and wear the store's goods. It shows that the employee not only sells but also uses the product day-to-day.

Re:Barring?

[0100010001010011]

I've had a dog and I've owned Microsoft products. I'm not sure if "eating its own dog food" is the correct analogy.

Re:Barring?

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw you and your God damned "logic." I hate MS and all they stand for, so this is an egregious exercise in corporate favoritism/fascism. Then again I do not like Apple either so it is not so bad. Wait, I also no longer like google. Fuck it, I need a beer.

Re:Barring?

[spire3661]

Its appropriate for the time period his story is set in.

Re:Barring?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, this isn't anywhere close to the truth. MS used an in-house developed Xenix-based mail system internally prior to the release of Exchange 4.0 (the first version of exchange, and a followup to MSMail 3.0). Starting in the last phase before release and continuing for a few months or so ITG did a phased migration off of Xenix mail and onto Exchange. There wasn't any particular pain outside the usual complexity of doing any large migration. This was all well before Hotmail was a part of Microsoft.

Source: I was on the exchange team at the time.

Re:Barring?

[black3d]

Name a bug in Office that has been there more than a decade which affects your usage of the product.

None?

That's why people who type "M$" are criticized. Because it shows they're speaking purely out of spiteful bias and simply like to parrot things "they've heard" on the interwebs. This commonly occurred for example, with Windows Vista, where the product was hugely, widely bashed by people who had never used it. In fact, it's still bashed by people who've never used it. And the faults they describe largely either didn't exist, or only affected a small number of users.

"M$" simply demonstrates a mind-set of pre-determination by the writer, and suggests they're not going to be rational in any of the arguments they make.

Re:Barring?

[alexandre_ganso]

Of all things, you went to choose the Republic of Ireland's most known symbol to say that is UK?

Ok, I know, uk, england, northern ireland, great britain, commonwealth, queen's territories, all this crap IS confusing. But let me get you a couple of things straight:

- Ireland is an Island. On it, there are two countries. One is Northern Ireland, another is Republic of Ireland;
- Northern Ireland is part of UK, commonwealth or whatever. Its currency is the british pound. Its capital is Belfast
- Republic of Ireland is an independent country which today has nothing to do with uk. It is part of the Euro zone. Its capital is Dublin. DUBLIN THE CITY WHERE GUINNESS IS MADE (mostly)
- There is some animosity between the Irish and the British, to say the least. What you just said might be considered offensive in there.

Republic of Ireland is not the most resourceful country on the planet, granted. But two things you can bet they are very proud of: Their Guinness and their Jameson's.

Re:Barring?

[serviscope_minor]

How about Micros~1?

Re:Barring?

[colsandurz45]

Actually Guinness is a UK owned company. Diageo owns Guinness

Right

[mwvdlee]

And this is news... how exactly?
Don't most companies ban using company funds to buy competitors' products for operational staff?

Re:Right

[ashmon]

They're just letting us know that MS wants its own employees to use the best possible tech available.

Re:Right

[sideslash]

It's news because the largest software company in the world is ignoring the fastest growing platform for software in the world, rather than writing software for it.

Don't post about subjects you're unfamiliar with. Microsoft has always written a lot of software for the Mac, and even today has a bunch of stuff both released and in development for the iPad. It makes sense with their dogfooding policies to favor Windows stuff for their staff, but they are by no means "ignoring" iOS.

Just like a lot of companies

[g051051]

Lots of companies, including the one I work for, won't let you arbitrarily buy Apple products with company money.

Re:Just like a lot of companies

[houghi]

It is not just Apple. I was not allowed to buy a Learjet last week.

I am no longer surprised.

[aardvarkjoe]

Just when I thought that the quality level of Slashdot stories couldn't get any lower, samzenpus swoops in to prove me wrong.

Re:I am no longer surprised.

[c0d3g33k]

I'm giving up my moderation rights for this discussion to say that the next improvement Slashdot should implement is to allow moderation of the stories themselves. I'd love to be able to browse stories on the main page (or in a personal newsfeed) using a filter setting of my choosing based on the moderated quality of a story rather than topic, submitter etc.

Re:I am no longer surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

What did you expect? The story had "Microsoft" in the title and ended with a question mark. This pretty much always means it's bollocks. See these examples of headline that would not technically be wrong, due to the question mark, but that are clearly inflamatory and designed for nothing more than page hits:

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs spent $10 billion dollars on FUD campaigns?"

"Google stole your credit card details?"

On that note, I think just to prove the point I'll publish my own little mini story within this thread to prove the point:

Samzenpus is a child rapist?
=====================
It turns out that a guy was arrested for child abuse earlier this year who held the same first name as Samzenpus, could it therefore in fact be Samzenpus himself who raped these children?

Re:I am no longer surprised.

[synapse7]

Think how surprised he would be when such story is posted again hours later.

"With company funds"

[Anonymous Coward]

"With company funds" being the keywords here.

Re:"With company funds"

[LordLimecat]

It warms my heart to see that everyone saw that key phrase and pointed it out rather than descending to a frenzy of fanboism and irrational argument over platforms.

Sounds Reasonable

[donleyp]

Do you think that there are any people at Apple with Windows laptops? Probably a few, but talk about a career limiting move :) Fun fact: new employees at Google are told that "they better have a good reason" if they request a Windows laptop for their primary machine.

The Car Analogy

[jdastrup]

And Ford employees are only giving a discount when buying Ford cars, and only specific Ford cars. It doesn't stop them from buying a different car with their own money for their own personal use.

Interesting, though, that it's only certain departments, not the entire company. Going back to Ford, many of the senior levels I knew were allowed to buy (or at least drive company-owned cars) that were the competition. They claimed it helped them learn about the competition. I have no problem with that.

Why is this a story?

[Karmashock]

I'm pretty sure apple has similar rules about buying MS products with company funds.

Would apple be okay with their employees buying lots of MS mobile phones using company resources? I doubt it. Sure, there's not much chance of them choosing to do that but the reality is that no company is going to be happy about it's employees using company resources to buy a competitor's products.

Re:Ah, stupid manager alert!

[Registered Coward v2]

Cpu6502 will no doubt rush through the ranks as a manager because he has the usual manager capability to confuse the disease with the symptom.

Car companies often have the parking lot filled with the companies cars and NOT because of any guidelines (cars are after all privately bought by the people in production) but because the employees feel connected to the company and are proud of what they produce.

While they may be proud of what they produce , most also get a sizable company discount. For many, wallet no doubt wins over price.

MS clearly is totally unable to inspire loyalty in its employees to feel proud of what they produce and want to show it. You can then put out a guideline forcing people to show fake pride but then you are just fighting the symptom, not the disease. If MS can't even build products good enough that people who want to work for you want to have the products... they got no chance in hell of selling to the rest of us. Eat your own dog food and if you got to beat the god to get it to eat, you failed.

No, they're saying that you can't use MS funds to pay for Apple products or phone bills for non-MS phones. Not unreasonable, and quite frankly having them use their products can also result in some real world feedback on what works and what doesn't. Do employees prefer Apple products? Probably,and I'd bet it was a big enough percentage that MS decided to stop paying for competitors products. I had a friend who filled up his company car with a competitors gasoline - and got a note back, after he expensed it, from his boss saying "we don't buy non- Union 76 gas with company funds."

I do agree that the company discount argument is irrelevant and MS should see why employees prefer Apple products to their competing ones; but that is separate form putting money in a competitor's pocket.

Re:allow moderation of the stories

[TaoPhoenix]

That's the Firehose.

The users already do moderate those, but then the editors get a 1000% weighted vote to override the user moderations and post whatever they like.

Re:well duh

[DeathElk]

This is a common misconception spread by anti-apple people, or people who have not used an iPad. Visit any recording studio (home or professional) and you are likely to see iPads being used as instruments, console/transport extensions, composition scratchpads, etc etc. WRT data entry, I wouldn't want to type on one all day, but as a note taking device, the screen based keyboard is perfect for touch typing.