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?

[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?

[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.

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?

"With company funds"

[Anonymous Coward]

"With company funds" being the keywords here.

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.