The only enthusiastic things I hear about those tablets are about the integration with current Microsoft software and that for 99% in the work space environment.
Which is microsoft's whole deal, where the money is, and the way into the market. With office 2013 they're pushing to make home a lot more like enterprise. If people can understand what features they get, and how to use them then suddenly it becomes a compelling product. Of course no one outside of MS HQ really understands everything you can do with office, so that barrier to entry is probably insurmountable. However, students will find a lot of enterprise features really useful, and the computer illiterate would find things like cloud storage useful for when they kill their computers and don't have to copy everything over, but they're computer illiterate and can't take advantage of those features.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Surface is supposed to be significantly more capable as a content creation product than ipads and android tablets which are basically content consumption devices. There is a market there, unfortunately Windows 8 is sufficiently terrible that I'm not sure anyone really wants windows 8 devices.
With all of this it's about building the critical mass to get developers on board to make compelling software you can't get elsewhere. MS seems to have a vision for a combined windows 8 family across phones desktop and tablets, but the base of that visions is windows 8 which is terrible. That doesn't mean there isn't something they could do that would make the whole thing really compelling though, I just doubt their users could manage it.
Keep in mind Apple only sold 40 million iPads in 2011. That seems like a lot compared to say... android tablets. But windows 7 sells about 240 million copies a year. If they can present it as easier to use, easier to connect with the PC etc. people might go for it. Lots of people are completely baffled by iPads (seems odd, I know) but those people don't *have* iPads. Of course those people also aren't going to have a clue how to use windows 8 either, but there's probably 200 million customers who's needs aren't served by iPads or android and MS is figuring they could eat up a chunk of that, though admittedly, they'll cannibalize some of their own laptop sales with surface.
it's possible they updated since you posted this. The first link is a callback to the previous/. story, the second link is to a tech crunch article about how effective the policy was in south korea.
Not anywhere that still goes after apostasy. To the contrary, running on a platform of rounding up and executing the gays would be a great way to get elected (or appointed) in places like saudi, iran, uganda, etc.
It will also help governments demand people say supportive things. For example, right now lots of authoritarian regimes are happy to demand people show up to parades and pretend to be excited (and leader speeches and so on). Now imagine being told you don't 'like the dear leader enough' on the north korean future equivalent of facebook and twitter and so on.
Depends on the alternatives, but at this point I would expect most major releases to be done primarily through XBL/PSN store fronts, and on PC through the Windows App store and Steam. (On the Xbox 3/PS4/Windows etc.) There's no room in this market for gamestop, and there's no way publishers are going to agree to a service that has used game sales the way gamestop does going forward. Hell, the publishers told gamestop about this years ago, but they didn't listen.
Gamestop owning impulse does give them a bit of a leg up that they can use, but impulse is nothing compared to steam, and the PC market if you exclude MMO's is basically nothing compared to the console market anyway. (I'd exclude MMO's because they can have completely different business models which are primarily driven by a direct consumer-developer relationship).
And yes, the EU has ruled in favour of used game sales. Don't expect anyone not based in Europe to actually go along with it.
At one point gamestop was the place to be to sell your game. They had (and still do have) about 25% of the game market, walmart another 25%. But now no one really wants their titles in gamestop because a day after release there will be used copies for sale for 5 bucks less than new. So it's become an adversarial relationship (the same problem MS has with surface basically), it's one of those things where if you make console games it's a necessary evil for now, but if you make PC games you're happy to never have to deal with them again.
Big companies can rarely continue innovating and winning in new spaces
once you get big it's more about recognizing innovation, and buying it (which is what IBM does a lot of) rather than leading the innovation yourself. That's probably why MS had a small stake in facebook and has a fairly large research arm. You need to know where the innovations are happening to be able to capitalize on them, and occasionally you might discover something useful on your own.
Failing that, you can always just copy other peoples innovation, and as long as you have the cash to support it you can get to market before they can, or more polished, or combined with other tech they can't afford and so on. I suspect this is why Apple has such a strong culture of secrecy; they don't want MS (and Google) to know quite what they're up to until after they've done it. MS on the other hand can't really hide anything major because they rely on all of their downstream partners for so much.
Well there's the question. If you can get 75 or 80 % accuracy in an academic setting (Which is not too hard to achieve) that may not be all that useful in a commercial environment where having a 20% error rate might completely wreck the experience.
Unfortunately all of this stuff falls under 'human testing' where I am. We wanted to do a (really short) experiment to see how different coloured icons effected a players ability to remember what an ability was. Once we realized it was something like 70 pages of paperwork and a lot of money for oversight, and this was a class project, not a research project, we basically threw our hands in the air and said fuck it, not worth it. When you are dealing with people with learning disabilities you have to worry (a lot) about anonymizing the data, making sure there's no way this could get out etc. You have to prove your experiment couldn't cause further harm to someone who has an LD etc. Honestly the rules are a bit overzealous for this kinda stuff, but that's what we have to do.
Believe it or not, the symptoms of ADHD can be quantified pretty well. You need a large data set, and you do end up with a situation where sleep deprivation mimics ADHD symptoms, so you could easily not be able to distinguish between the two. But you can track the symptoms of problems well. For colour blindness it's really really straightforward to test. Different specific problems will be more or less easy to try and detect of course.
With a camera you can track peoples vision. You can correlate reaction time to what's going on in game, all sorts of stuff. Games actually work very well for people with ADD because they have a constant stream of rewards keeping you focused on the task. One of the things we worry about when talking about game addiction is that it's not so much addiction as it is one of the few problems people will naturally pay attention to if they have ADD. The logical follow on to that comes from training people at various stages of brain development to behave that way (by giving them rewards), and then having games be a causation problem. Not that we know if that's actually happening yet, but that's certainly something people who do research in this area are worried about.
There are a few other tangential symptoms how quickly you get frustrated that sort of thing. Those can actually be tracked, the more sensitive the controller (if it has a gyroscope in it) the more easily you can figure out if the player is mashing buttons particularly hard, that sort of thing.
Language, hours of access, reaction time, friends (once you know one is a minor you can work backwards).
Kids also have certain stages of development with language and reasoning, and they will suffer from difficulties with particular challenges in sequence.
While not my research area, I'm AI development, there are people in my research group who have looked at this problem. Even with machine learning, if you have a reasonably accurate training set you can blindly pick out certain things.
Even basic stuff. Do they have a credit card in their name? If not then you don't have proof of course, but you can start to combine with other factors and start seeing a pattern of child like behaviour.
Kids will also like some much more childish games in addition to adult ones (so an 11 year old might play a game like 'campers!' just released for the iphone, and grand theft auto, whereas a 30 year old would only play grand theft auto).
But yes, obviously 100 billion dollars was speculative, and in zuckerbergs defence, he hasn't had time to spend the billions they raised on whatever his plan is to make money. Not that I have any faith that he would succeed, but I would have expected more info on whatever they're trying (if they're trying anything, and if not, they're doomed).
as I said, 300 million dollars profit in a quarter for an outfit with 4000 employees is nothing to sneeze at. But they need to catch up to something near their valuation or their stock could completely implode.
Zynga has a significant strategy in other platforms already. What they need is to ask their users to switch from Facebook too something else before facebook implodes. Simply offer the same service and all of player progress on another platform and most of those people can stay locked in.
"You wouldn't steal a car, so why would you copy an MP3?"
if you were as likely to get caught, and the punishments were about the same would you?
Is stealing a BMW the same as stealing a Yugo?
Workplace rules about sexual harassment are 0 tolerance. Don't do it. If you don't grasp that, and you still think that you can treat even a glance and an expression at a young attractive office intern as nothing, but hitting them as something, you're in for a world of hurt if one of them ever complains. Ever.
I drew the comparison precisely because whether or not you think one is as serious as the other is irrelevant, they are both taken very seriously by the law, and both can land you in a world of trouble.
Zynga at least can turn on a dime away from facebook. In 4 months most of their properties could be converted, or at least ported to non-facebook, either as just web games on their own or for mobile or the like.
Assuming they survive the latest insider trading accusations of course.
I think Zuckerberg was right to stay out of a public offering, and he should have.
Tell that to the hundreds perhaps small thousands of employees who had been receiving stock as part of their compensation packages. The reason you have to go public over something like 500 shareholders is that they are entitled to a say in the business, because it's their money, and their business at that point.
Facebook needs something big to point to and say 'this is how we're going to make money', that, believe it or not, does not actually have to have anything to do with facebook the website and privacy invasion service. Now they are able to make money, 300 million dollars in profit in a quarter (minus stock compensation for employees which pushed them on paper into the negative), for a company with ~4000 employees is pretty good, but they aren't worth 100 billion dollars like that. So either they need something they can legally sell, or they need to expect to lose even more of their valuation.
if this had been a defcon presentation rather than a forbes article there would be no question. They're talking about the ability to compromise locks (including electronic ones) by basically banging the safe a couple of times. As an exercise in technical security it's some combination of hilarious and terrifying.
Believe it or not, I think there's a lot we can philosophically grasp from this. What is the legal obligation for a company that sells a product that isn't even kind of secure, while claiming it to be? None. Security that can be compromised by a 3 year old will be, and that probably applies as much to computer security as it does safe security. etc.
The most obvious is a testament to 'obscurity is not security', a 3 year old, who isn't really capable of understanding safe design, and therefore faces complete obscurity can still open a safe by basically trying to pick it up, and then dropping it.
In this case they are similar because they are both illegal, both broadly covered under workplace health and safety rules, and something you can be sued for if you don't do due diligence to prevent it.
Physical violence is unambiguously not tolerated, anywhere. Some people are not of the mindset to treat sexual harassment like that, unfortunately for them the law is as unforgiving as it is on physical actions. Bad press is bad, and a sexual harassment lawsuit will bring out every gold digging ex employee, every employee who had one joke she didn't like but tried to laugh it off, and then you're on the hook for an astronomical amount in legal fees and damages.
when did maturity or civility enter into a discussion where its primarily lawyers involved?
peculiarly American perception seems to be that any reference to anything of a sexual nature in any context can "harass" someone who hears it.
I'm canadian, but the rules are basically the same here for the same reason. One person being offended or being a gold digger is all it takes to put you out of business. You absolutely do not say anything that could even be construed as viewing a woman in any sort of sexual way. That's a path to being out of work.
Admittedly, this is probably a bit of an over correction from how people behaved when women could be forcibly retired for getting pregnant and were expected to work long enough to find a husband and then GTFO, but there's still a valid justification for protecting employees.
And that supposes you could claim ARM as a separate market from x86. MS could probably pretty easily argue that there is a tablet market, and that they have offerings in that market where you have to use restricted boot, and some where you don't. At that point you'd have to show they are intentionally making it hard to get the ARM only version, which if they have any brains (and they might not) they won't.
Ya, if you could take a flight from New York to Beijing or Tokyo in 5 or 6 hours versus 12-20 you might be making a compelling sale. But transatlantic routes just aren't that big of a deal.
As did the added layers of security. I've always lived about 2 hours from a major airport (Toronto). To spend at least 3 -5 hours before I even get on on the aircraft, to spend another 3-8 hours in the air, means I'm looking at at least 6 hours, and more like 8 or 9 hours minimum to get somewhere, versus 12 or 13. At that point the whole next day is a write off anyway.
Being able to do real work means you get a lot less from saving a couple of hours travel time,and having to waste hours before you can even board a plane to get through security means the time you save by a shortened flight is proportionally less. Between fax machines and the internet there's much less demand for moving documents back and forth, so ya, I think other less aircraft driven technologies also pushed concorde out of business.
no one, we are the enemy of an open workplace apparently. But those are the rules. Taking your chances with sexual harassment is a disaster waiting to happen.
But yes, the law is not forgiving of any sort of non compliance, and it's supremely dickish to have terminate an employee who even looks suggestively at a young woman who came to work in a skimpy outfit. If you don't want a lawsuit, and the bad press that comes with it (which isn't survivable for a small company) then that's what you have to do. We live in a crazy world.
Believe me I think there are a lot of people who get wrongfully terminated for sexual harassment. But you don't mess around with this stuff, just because the rules are overzealous doesn't mean you aren't required to follow them - and to your peril if you don't.
One of my buddies who's was programme director put it something like 'I'm terrified to hire a female employee for fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit, and I'm terrified to not hire one for fear of being accused of gender discrimination'. Of course when you think like that eventually the stress gets to you and you need to find a new job, but that is, unfortunately, the reality of the law, and why I'm not in management.
In this case the phone didn't hit the employee, but our workplace rules required anyone who could have been struck (i.e. in the room) file a report about their position in case they were hit and didn't realize it at the time.
It seemed like busy work for lawyers, and it probably was, but I'm guessing the rules were more intended for gas leaks or something more likely to cause harm than a phone. But ya, in a situation like this, which is a lawsuit waiting to happen (physical abuse of staff, or sexual harassment or the like) there is 1 overarching policy: cover your ass. It also made clear to anyone else that the employer took this action seriously, both the welfare of their employees and reinforced the 0 tolerance policy.
Slashdot Mirror
The only enthusiastic things I hear about those tablets are about the integration with current Microsoft software and that for 99% in the work space environment.
Which is microsoft's whole deal, where the money is, and the way into the market. With office 2013 they're pushing to make home a lot more like enterprise. If people can understand what features they get, and how to use them then suddenly it becomes a compelling product. Of course no one outside of MS HQ really understands everything you can do with office, so that barrier to entry is probably insurmountable. However, students will find a lot of enterprise features really useful, and the computer illiterate would find things like cloud storage useful for when they kill their computers and don't have to copy everything over, but they're computer illiterate and can't take advantage of those features.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Surface is supposed to be significantly more capable as a content creation product than ipads and android tablets which are basically content consumption devices. There is a market there, unfortunately Windows 8 is sufficiently terrible that I'm not sure anyone really wants windows 8 devices.
With all of this it's about building the critical mass to get developers on board to make compelling software you can't get elsewhere. MS seems to have a vision for a combined windows 8 family across phones desktop and tablets, but the base of that visions is windows 8 which is terrible. That doesn't mean there isn't something they could do that would make the whole thing really compelling though, I just doubt their users could manage it.
Keep in mind Apple only sold 40 million iPads in 2011. That seems like a lot compared to say... android tablets. But windows 7 sells about 240 million copies a year. If they can present it as easier to use, easier to connect with the PC etc. people might go for it. Lots of people are completely baffled by iPads (seems odd, I know) but those people don't *have* iPads. Of course those people also aren't going to have a clue how to use windows 8 either, but there's probably 200 million customers who's needs aren't served by iPads or android and MS is figuring they could eat up a chunk of that, though admittedly, they'll cannibalize some of their own laptop sales with surface.
it's possible they updated since you posted this. The first link is a callback to the previous /. story, the second link is to a tech crunch article about how effective the policy was in south korea.
homosexuality is a politically protected class
Not anywhere that still goes after apostasy. To the contrary, running on a platform of rounding up and executing the gays would be a great way to get elected (or appointed) in places like saudi, iran, uganda, etc.
It will also help governments demand people say supportive things. For example, right now lots of authoritarian regimes are happy to demand people show up to parades and pretend to be excited (and leader speeches and so on). Now imagine being told you don't 'like the dear leader enough' on the north korean future equivalent of facebook and twitter and so on.
Depends on the alternatives, but at this point I would expect most major releases to be done primarily through XBL/PSN store fronts, and on PC through the Windows App store and Steam. (On the Xbox 3/PS4/Windows etc.) There's no room in this market for gamestop, and there's no way publishers are going to agree to a service that has used game sales the way gamestop does going forward. Hell, the publishers told gamestop about this years ago, but they didn't listen.
Gamestop owning impulse does give them a bit of a leg up that they can use, but impulse is nothing compared to steam, and the PC market if you exclude MMO's is basically nothing compared to the console market anyway. (I'd exclude MMO's because they can have completely different business models which are primarily driven by a direct consumer-developer relationship).
And yes, the EU has ruled in favour of used game sales. Don't expect anyone not based in Europe to actually go along with it.
At one point gamestop was the place to be to sell your game. They had (and still do have) about 25% of the game market, walmart another 25%. But now no one really wants their titles in gamestop because a day after release there will be used copies for sale for 5 bucks less than new. So it's become an adversarial relationship (the same problem MS has with surface basically), it's one of those things where if you make console games it's a necessary evil for now, but if you make PC games you're happy to never have to deal with them again.
Big companies can rarely continue innovating and winning in new spaces
once you get big it's more about recognizing innovation, and buying it (which is what IBM does a lot of) rather than leading the innovation yourself. That's probably why MS had a small stake in facebook and has a fairly large research arm. You need to know where the innovations are happening to be able to capitalize on them, and occasionally you might discover something useful on your own.
Failing that, you can always just copy other peoples innovation, and as long as you have the cash to support it you can get to market before they can, or more polished, or combined with other tech they can't afford and so on. I suspect this is why Apple has such a strong culture of secrecy; they don't want MS (and Google) to know quite what they're up to until after they've done it. MS on the other hand can't really hide anything major because they rely on all of their downstream partners for so much.
with any certainty
Well there's the question. If you can get 75 or 80 % accuracy in an academic setting (Which is not too hard to achieve) that may not be all that useful in a commercial environment where having a 20% error rate might completely wreck the experience.
Unfortunately all of this stuff falls under 'human testing' where I am. We wanted to do a (really short) experiment to see how different coloured icons effected a players ability to remember what an ability was. Once we realized it was something like 70 pages of paperwork and a lot of money for oversight, and this was a class project, not a research project, we basically threw our hands in the air and said fuck it, not worth it. When you are dealing with people with learning disabilities you have to worry (a lot) about anonymizing the data, making sure there's no way this could get out etc. You have to prove your experiment couldn't cause further harm to someone who has an LD etc. Honestly the rules are a bit overzealous for this kinda stuff, but that's what we have to do.
Believe it or not, the symptoms of ADHD can be quantified pretty well. You need a large data set, and you do end up with a situation where sleep deprivation mimics ADHD symptoms, so you could easily not be able to distinguish between the two. But you can track the symptoms of problems well. For colour blindness it's really really straightforward to test. Different specific problems will be more or less easy to try and detect of course.
With a camera you can track peoples vision. You can correlate reaction time to what's going on in game, all sorts of stuff. Games actually work very well for people with ADD because they have a constant stream of rewards keeping you focused on the task. One of the things we worry about when talking about game addiction is that it's not so much addiction as it is one of the few problems people will naturally pay attention to if they have ADD. The logical follow on to that comes from training people at various stages of brain development to behave that way (by giving them rewards), and then having games be a causation problem. Not that we know if that's actually happening yet, but that's certainly something people who do research in this area are worried about.
There are a few other tangential symptoms how quickly you get frustrated that sort of thing. Those can actually be tracked, the more sensitive the controller (if it has a gyroscope in it) the more easily you can figure out if the player is mashing buttons particularly hard, that sort of thing.
Language, hours of access, reaction time, friends (once you know one is a minor you can work backwards).
Kids also have certain stages of development with language and reasoning, and they will suffer from difficulties with particular challenges in sequence.
While not my research area, I'm AI development, there are people in my research group who have looked at this problem. Even with machine learning, if you have a reasonably accurate training set you can blindly pick out certain things.
Even basic stuff. Do they have a credit card in their name? If not then you don't have proof of course, but you can start to combine with other factors and start seeing a pattern of child like behaviour.
Kids will also like some much more childish games in addition to adult ones (so an 11 year old might play a game like 'campers!' just released for the iphone, and grand theft auto, whereas a 30 year old would only play grand theft auto).
see google adwords.
But yes, obviously 100 billion dollars was speculative, and in zuckerbergs defence, he hasn't had time to spend the billions they raised on whatever his plan is to make money. Not that I have any faith that he would succeed, but I would have expected more info on whatever they're trying (if they're trying anything, and if not, they're doomed).
as I said, 300 million dollars profit in a quarter for an outfit with 4000 employees is nothing to sneeze at. But they need to catch up to something near their valuation or their stock could completely implode.
Zynga has a significant strategy in other platforms already. What they need is to ask their users to switch from Facebook too something else before facebook implodes. Simply offer the same service and all of player progress on another platform and most of those people can stay locked in.
"You wouldn't steal a car, so why would you copy an MP3?"
if you were as likely to get caught, and the punishments were about the same would you?
Is stealing a BMW the same as stealing a Yugo?
Workplace rules about sexual harassment are 0 tolerance. Don't do it. If you don't grasp that, and you still think that you can treat even a glance and an expression at a young attractive office intern as nothing, but hitting them as something, you're in for a world of hurt if one of them ever complains. Ever.
I drew the comparison precisely because whether or not you think one is as serious as the other is irrelevant, they are both taken very seriously by the law, and both can land you in a world of trouble.
Zynga at least can turn on a dime away from facebook. In 4 months most of their properties could be converted, or at least ported to non-facebook, either as just web games on their own or for mobile or the like.
Assuming they survive the latest insider trading accusations of course.
I think Zuckerberg was right to stay out of a public offering, and he should have.
Tell that to the hundreds perhaps small thousands of employees who had been receiving stock as part of their compensation packages. The reason you have to go public over something like 500 shareholders is that they are entitled to a say in the business, because it's their money, and their business at that point.
Facebook needs something big to point to and say 'this is how we're going to make money', that, believe it or not, does not actually have to have anything to do with facebook the website and privacy invasion service. Now they are able to make money, 300 million dollars in profit in a quarter (minus stock compensation for employees which pushed them on paper into the negative), for a company with ~4000 employees is pretty good, but they aren't worth 100 billion dollars like that. So either they need something they can legally sell, or they need to expect to lose even more of their valuation.
How is this really news for nerds
if this had been a defcon presentation rather than a forbes article there would be no question. They're talking about the ability to compromise locks (including electronic ones) by basically banging the safe a couple of times. As an exercise in technical security it's some combination of hilarious and terrifying.
Believe it or not, I think there's a lot we can philosophically grasp from this. What is the legal obligation for a company that sells a product that isn't even kind of secure, while claiming it to be? None. Security that can be compromised by a 3 year old will be, and that probably applies as much to computer security as it does safe security. etc.
The most obvious is a testament to 'obscurity is not security', a 3 year old, who isn't really capable of understanding safe design, and therefore faces complete obscurity can still open a safe by basically trying to pick it up, and then dropping it.
In this case they are similar because they are both illegal, both broadly covered under workplace health and safety rules, and something you can be sued for if you don't do due diligence to prevent it.
Physical violence is unambiguously not tolerated, anywhere. Some people are not of the mindset to treat sexual harassment like that, unfortunately for them the law is as unforgiving as it is on physical actions. Bad press is bad, and a sexual harassment lawsuit will bring out every gold digging ex employee, every employee who had one joke she didn't like but tried to laugh it off, and then you're on the hook for an astronomical amount in legal fees and damages.
IMHO a mature workplace
when did maturity or civility enter into a discussion where its primarily lawyers involved?
peculiarly American perception seems to be that any reference to anything of a sexual nature in any context can "harass" someone who hears it.
I'm canadian, but the rules are basically the same here for the same reason. One person being offended or being a gold digger is all it takes to put you out of business. You absolutely do not say anything that could even be construed as viewing a woman in any sort of sexual way. That's a path to being out of work.
Admittedly, this is probably a bit of an over correction from how people behaved when women could be forcibly retired for getting pregnant and were expected to work long enough to find a husband and then GTFO, but there's still a valid justification for protecting employees.
And that supposes you could claim ARM as a separate market from x86. MS could probably pretty easily argue that there is a tablet market, and that they have offerings in that market where you have to use restricted boot, and some where you don't. At that point you'd have to show they are intentionally making it hard to get the ARM only version, which if they have any brains (and they might not) they won't.
Once you do that the government will move in an legislate something else. That is what governments do.
Ya, if you could take a flight from New York to Beijing or Tokyo in 5 or 6 hours versus 12-20 you might be making a compelling sale. But transatlantic routes just aren't that big of a deal.
As did the added layers of security. I've always lived about 2 hours from a major airport (Toronto). To spend at least 3 -5 hours before I even get on on the aircraft, to spend another 3-8 hours in the air, means I'm looking at at least 6 hours, and more like 8 or 9 hours minimum to get somewhere, versus 12 or 13. At that point the whole next day is a write off anyway.
Being able to do real work means you get a lot less from saving a couple of hours travel time,and having to waste hours before you can even board a plane to get through security means the time you save by a shortened flight is proportionally less. Between fax machines and the internet there's much less demand for moving documents back and forth, so ya, I think other less aircraft driven technologies also pushed concorde out of business.
of course, who cares about them, right
no one, we are the enemy of an open workplace apparently. But those are the rules. Taking your chances with sexual harassment is a disaster waiting to happen.
I grant I wasn't perfectly clear about it.
But yes, the law is not forgiving of any sort of non compliance, and it's supremely dickish to have terminate an employee who even looks suggestively at a young woman who came to work in a skimpy outfit. If you don't want a lawsuit, and the bad press that comes with it (which isn't survivable for a small company) then that's what you have to do. We live in a crazy world.
Believe me I think there are a lot of people who get wrongfully terminated for sexual harassment. But you don't mess around with this stuff, just because the rules are overzealous doesn't mean you aren't required to follow them - and to your peril if you don't.
One of my buddies who's was programme director put it something like 'I'm terrified to hire a female employee for fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit, and I'm terrified to not hire one for fear of being accused of gender discrimination'. Of course when you think like that eventually the stress gets to you and you need to find a new job, but that is, unfortunately, the reality of the law, and why I'm not in management.
In this case the phone didn't hit the employee, but our workplace rules required anyone who could have been struck (i.e. in the room) file a report about their position in case they were hit and didn't realize it at the time.
It seemed like busy work for lawyers, and it probably was, but I'm guessing the rules were more intended for gas leaks or something more likely to cause harm than a phone. But ya, in a situation like this, which is a lawsuit waiting to happen (physical abuse of staff, or sexual harassment or the like) there is 1 overarching policy: cover your ass. It also made clear to anyone else that the employer took this action seriously, both the welfare of their employees and reinforced the 0 tolerance policy.