Just this week Steve Ballmer stated that this is not the case. He now views Microsoft as a "device and services" company. Of course, what they are, and what he wishes that the world thinks they are could very well be different things. They've tried very hard though, with XBox, Zune, and Windows Phone to break into the business.
Apple has always viewed itself as a hardware company who happens to bundle the software with the hardware, and it seems to be working out pretty well for them.
One VP for whom I used to work referred to employees that left right at closing time as "Fred Flintstones." He made sure his derisive attitude towards these employees was well displayed in front of the CEO of the company at the end of the day as the line of cars left the parking lot. Most of the employees who stayed after the 5PM quitting time were there because they started their shifts later than the other employees.
This VP's attitude blinded him to the fact that those be labeled "Fred Flintstones" were on the job first thing in the morning [...]
This attitude irks me. The agreement was for X hours per week for $Y in pay, right? But now that the company wants X+10 hours of work each week, somehow Mr. Flintstone is "not a team player".
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
>
And nine women can produce a baby in just one month. In China they actually use 270 women to produce a new baby in one day. Hones! I read it on the internets.
I disagree. Estimates and planning do serve a very good purpose as long as they are treated as estimates and planning. Estimates allow management to reconsider scope of a project or choose alternatives, perhaps cancel a project if the estimate obliterates the business case. Planning allows management to keep track of how well estimates are met and adjust either planning or projects accordingly. All too often though, estimates and planning are treated as deadlines.
Preach on, brother! I'll just add:
One key element of effective estimating is taking time at the end of the project to calculate and measure how long it actually took.
It's too easy to skip this step, since investing time after the project is done is often viewed as a waste, but not closing the feedback loop by getting the data and learning from it means that the next estimate will be just as much of a wild-assed guess as this one was.
IME you can't beat the customer service from T-Mobile. Verizon's has been less than great and their prices are through the roof.
That was my experience, too, until I went pre-paid with T-Mobile. The price difference between pre- and post-paid plans with them boggles the mind. Our family had two phones on a post-paid family plan, SMS and voice only. We switched to two separate prepaid plans for the phones, and everything went downhill customer service-wise. I assume that dialing customer service from a pre-paid phone goes to a different call center than the post-paid accounts.
This is ridiculous, unless you like work for the mafia or something.
There's been plenty of work done studying it and it disagrees with your assertion. People who take counter-offers have lower job satisfaction, are less likely to be promoted and have a tendency to leave for a different company within a short window of accepting it. The only thing that is ridiculous is you thinking you can somehow make a definitive statement on this.
Having said that it doesn't mean that it is never beneficial to accept counter-offers, that every company is the same etc. One fundamental point is that many of the cases where the counter-offer worked out badly are where the person disliked their job, boss, company culture etc so simply adding more money didn't solve the underlying issue.
Spot on. Once you mention that you've got another offer, you've shown your hand and need to be prepared to play your cards. You've shown your current company that you are unhappy enough that you are at actively looking for a new job, or at least entertaining outside offers. They might try to counter, or they might show you the door; be very sure that the new offer is solid before revealing it to your current employer.
If you are looking for another position because of money, then it might be wise to take the counteroffer. If it's something else, then money will not fix it, and you are better off going with the new job.
Only if they're stupid enough to execute code formed from non-executable input.
Hey, it could happen. The most likely place in a bank to validate a bill is the ATM when a deposit is made, and who makes the ATM? Diebold. I see the headline 4 years from now: "ATMs declare George W. Bush winner of the popular vote."
A great example on why having your roommates assigned by the University is a bad idea. No wonder only the freshmen live in the dorms; everyone else learned that lesson their freshman year and moved on to arranging their own housing with roommates of their choosing.
But I digress...
I like your idea with the private property concept... I've always viewed that story with a different light. God created Adam and Eve as perfect beings, since that's what God does. It was up to them to choose to corrupt themselves and fall from God's grace, only by doing that could they learn consequence and take their first steps towards redemption, which was an essential part of the plan.
You enjoy it, you're not cheating on her, you're not spending huge amounts of money, and the time you spend isn't causing you to neglect your relationship with her, right?
Who you spend your time with is an indication of where you are investing your intimacy, so it might feel threatening to her that every month you choose to spend 8 hours of free time with some people she doesn't know or understand, excluding her from the group.
Next month invite the group to your house so she can see what it's all about. Don't make her join the game, just to see that it's your peer group's version of a poker night or a book club. Maybe have the other spouses come along; when they get bored watching, they can go to lunch or a movie together.
I was also a sunrocket customer, but I was about 18 months into my "buy one year at $199, get the second year free" agreement when they went under. I figured it was the way of the world and didn't feel too badly about the price I had paid for the value received and moved on.
My friend was in a similar situation as yourself; only a few months into his contract. When the company went bankrupt, he contacted his credit card company about the problem. They issued him a complete refund of the $199.
Looking back, it was sheer madness on my part to pony up $199 upfront for a company with no long-term reputation like sunrocket. Also a lesson learned: let the credit card company take the risk, not me.
Let's not open up the can of worms that is the shifty circumstances in which Teleblend "acquired" all assets and customers of sunrocket...
Yes. More than anything, to be prepared for your future you need to know how to learn things. When faced with a problem, you can only solve it with the knowledge you have. The more knowledge you have, the better your options to adapt and lead those who do not.
Math was never my favorite or best subject, but along the way to the degree I wanted (Electrical Engineering) I had to take enough math classes that I found myself just one class shy of qualifying as well for a minor in Mathematics. Since then, I can count on one hand the times in my career I've needed to use more than the Algebra that I learned in high school, but in those few instances it's been quite handy knowing how to do a bit more.
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier - not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Think of your English classes. You probably won't need to quote Shakespeare or spell obscure words perfectly each day of your life. We learn those things because after your formal education, most people find a comfort zone in their day to day lives that is less than their absolute best. Most people get along just fine day-to-day using only a vocabulary of only 300-400 words, but on certain occasions having that expanded vocabulary available to draw on is important when an idea just can't be expressed any other way.
Someone who bench presses 300 pounds regularly will have no problem benching 200 any time. Someone who gave up training being satisfied with being able to push up 200 pounds once will struggle with it every time.
Only super geniuses work at their peak all the time, so for the rest of us chugging along at 70% effort, our best chance for success is to peak as high as possible so that our everyday performance is good, too.
If you're satisfied with the level of math that you know, push yourself one level more. You've got to be in school all day anyway, right? Might as well make it worthwhile. You can be bored in class going through the motions on things you find easy, or you could challenge yourself by doing something new. You'll never again have the chance to do that for free. As a bonus, my experience in high school was that the classes where the students had to choose and strive to be there were also more enjoyable because of the attitudes of both the class and teacher.
I had one of my incisors broken out and the root severely injured when I was 14 or so. Since that time, I've endured a partial crown, a full crown, a root canal, and an apicoectomy before earlier this year my dentist and I decided it was finally really dying (I'm 36 now).
The tooth was extracted in February and the socket packed with cadaver bone, stitched over and left to heal for 3 months. In May, an implant was placed in the bone and then stitched over again, this time to wait for 4 months while the bone hopefully knits successfully around the implant. In a few more months I get to go back to have my gums cut open for the third time this year and have the post and crown installed. If the implant fails, then plan B involves more expense and time.
I imagine a brave, new, flying-car world of the future, where anything other than a routine cleaning at the dentist will mean an extraction and insertion of a small pellet in the gum that will cause a new tooth to grow within 3 months.
The stereo amplifier was an odd decision. Peopler either already have an amp, or they don't have speakers. What's the point of having an amp that connects to my TV to play video if I can't direct the TV's sound through the amp?
A very odd decision, especially at the 25W power level. 25W is slightly better than the built-in speakers on the TV, but completely inadequate for audiophiles who would care about having separate speakers from their TV.
To be fair, you wouldn't have had to use an Android phone; you'd have to use an Android device. Think cheapest commodity hardware, running free software. Right now that's under $100 and before too long it will be under $40. "Remotes" are on the cusp of obsolescence, to be replaced by "smartremotes."
But yeah, $300 was way too much for a neato "smartamp" and the weird Google services lock-in made it not really even good for that kind of job.
Not just any Android device, you have to have something running Jellybean, which means exactly one device, so far.
The Android OS also uses a cut down user land and a cut down C runtime called BIONIC.
I hear these things like cut-down and lightweight. Honestly, how bloaty is the full glibc runtime and standard library? My 900MHz eee runs very nicely, and is now comparable in performance to high end phones.
Also, Linux ran very nicely with a full glibc on my P133 with 72M of RAM back in the day, the PII 400, then the PIII 850, then the P4 laptop, then eee, the Core i7 laptop...
I wonder at what point the "cut down" userland in Android is compared to the history of full userlands before.
I suspect that quite a bit of it is premature optimization.
You would be correct. The binaries for the runtimes are smaller, which is supposed to be good for both flash and RAM usage, but makes doing anything in C on an Android platform a royal nightmare. But, from Android's perspective that's OK, since you will be developing in Java anyway. The BIONIC library is custom-fit to include only the features that the Android team deemed necessary to get the system up to the point that developers can then use Java for applications.
If you have the displeasure of working at the Linux layer on an Android device, the first thing to do is install glibc and Busybox to bring peace to your soul.
This is something Microsoft should have undertaken immediately after acquiring Hotmail. Microsoft has a strong brand with Outlook, and it makes total sense to be using that brand for their webmail offering.
Doing it at this time also makes sense.
[...]
...they don't have a good history of execution on things like this--most likely the new platform will be horrible, but they'll keep at it
They'll keep at it, but it's as if they think everyone in the world is too stupid to remember how many times they'll fumble and reintroduce the same product with a different name every two years.
It continually amazes me when companies dump tons of money into acquiring a brand only to try their best to drive people away from using that brand rather than nurture the brand.
So which is it, Microsoft? Is it Hotmail, MSN, Live, or Outlook that you want me to think of when I want to check my e-mail? Going to Outlook.com redirects me to live.com to sign up. But, I don't use my "Windows Live ID" to login, I should now start calling it my "Microsoft account", even though I don't log in anywhere on microsoft.com with such a thing. Why not just give me a bing.com address? At least when people sent me mail there they would think of your other product.
Then again, this is the company that gave the same name to both a table and a tablet and spends marketing dollars to brand the sodas in their own cafeterias to educate their workforce on the names of their products.
its like getting questioned by a cop. nothing good can come from that. just say as little as you can and get the hell out of there as fast as you can.
this is a no-win situation and they try to sell it as a way to 'fix' things that need fixing. there is zero truth to that, I assure you.
please, for your own sake, bypass the exit interview. please. you will thank me years from now for this advice. I learned the hard way. you should not have to.
Spot on. If you're sitting in an exit interview, remember two things: 1. The relationship between yourself and the company is beyond salvage. Hopefully the relationship is ending on your terms, but even if it isn't, no feedback given here is going to make it better; it's just too late for that. 2. You don't work for the company anymore. You don't owe them your expertise, insights, or time. Take the high road and thank them for their employment, and leave it at that.
The HR representative might try to bluff you into agreeing to an interview, saying something like it's "required" or "mandatory" or even suggesting that your last paycheck might only be handed over as part of the interview, but it's all crap. If you don't show up, what can they do, fire you? They are legally required to pay out your last paycheck.
Slashdot Mirror
Just this week Steve Ballmer stated that this is not the case. He now views Microsoft as a "device and services" company. Of course, what they are, and what he wishes that the world thinks they are could very well be different things. They've tried very hard though, with XBox, Zune, and Windows Phone to break into the business.
Apple has always viewed itself as a hardware company who happens to bundle the software with the hardware, and it seems to be working out pretty well for them.
Yes indeed, some customers are not worth having, at any price.
One VP for whom I used to work referred to employees that left right at closing time as "Fred Flintstones." He made sure his derisive attitude towards these employees was well displayed in front of the CEO of the company at the end of the day as the line of cars left the parking lot. Most of the employees who stayed after the 5PM quitting time were there because they started their shifts later than the other employees.
This VP's attitude blinded him to the fact that those be labeled "Fred Flintstones" were on the job first thing in the morning [...]
This attitude irks me. The agreement was for X hours per week for $Y in pay, right? But now that the company wants X+10 hours of work each week, somehow Mr. Flintstone is "not a team player".
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
>
And nine women can produce a baby in just one month. In China they actually use 270 women to produce a new baby in one day. Hones! I read it on the internets.
I think you're thinking of North Korea...
I disagree.
Estimates and planning do serve a very good purpose as long as they are treated as estimates and planning.
Estimates allow management to reconsider scope of a project or choose alternatives, perhaps cancel a project if the estimate obliterates the business case.
Planning allows management to keep track of how well estimates are met and adjust either planning or projects accordingly.
All too often though, estimates and planning are treated as deadlines.
Preach on, brother! I'll just add:
One key element of effective estimating is taking time at the end of the project to calculate and measure how long it actually took.
It's too easy to skip this step, since investing time after the project is done is often viewed as a waste, but not closing the feedback loop by getting the data and learning from it means that the next estimate will be just as much of a wild-assed guess as this one was.
One moon circles.
IME you can't beat the customer service from T-Mobile. Verizon's has been less than great and their prices are through the roof.
That was my experience, too, until I went pre-paid with T-Mobile. The price difference between pre- and post-paid plans with them boggles the mind. Our family had two phones on a post-paid family plan, SMS and voice only. We switched to two separate prepaid plans for the phones, and everything went downhill customer service-wise.
I assume that dialing customer service from a pre-paid phone goes to a different call center than the post-paid accounts.
Nonsense.
Well, you raise a good argument, there.
There's been plenty of work done studying it and it disagrees with your assertion. People who take counter-offers have lower job satisfaction, are less likely to be promoted and have a tendency to leave for a different company within a short window of accepting it. The only thing that is ridiculous is you thinking you can somehow make a definitive statement on this.
Having said that it doesn't mean that it is never beneficial to accept counter-offers, that every company is the same etc. One fundamental point is that many of the cases where the counter-offer worked out badly are where the person disliked their job, boss, company culture etc so simply adding more money didn't solve the underlying issue.
Spot on. Once you mention that you've got another offer, you've shown your hand and need to be prepared to play your cards. You've shown your current company that you are unhappy enough that you are at actively looking for a new job, or at least entertaining outside offers. They might try to counter, or they might show you the door; be very sure that the new offer is solid before revealing it to your current employer.
If you are looking for another position because of money, then it might be wise to take the counteroffer. If it's something else, then money will not fix it, and you are better off going with the new job.
Only if they're stupid enough to execute code formed from non-executable input.
Hey, it could happen. The most likely place in a bank to validate a bill is the ATM when a deposit is made, and who makes the ATM? Diebold. I see the headline 4 years from now: "ATMs declare George W. Bush winner of the popular vote."
A great example on why having your roommates assigned by the University is a bad idea.
No wonder only the freshmen live in the dorms; everyone else learned that lesson their freshman year and moved on to arranging their own housing with roommates of their choosing.
But I digress...
I like your idea with the private property concept... I've always viewed that story with a different light. God created Adam and Eve as perfect beings, since that's what God does. It was up to them to choose to corrupt themselves and fall from God's grace, only by doing that could they learn consequence and take their first steps towards redemption, which was an essential part of the plan.
Yeah, I'm sure they'll get right on that.
Not a bad idea to file the report, but don't hold your breath waiting for anything to happen.
You enjoy it, you're not cheating on her, you're not spending huge amounts of money, and the time you spend isn't causing you to neglect your relationship with her, right?
Who you spend your time with is an indication of where you are investing your intimacy, so it might feel threatening to her that every month you choose to spend 8 hours of free time with some people she doesn't know or understand, excluding her from the group.
Next month invite the group to your house so she can see what it's all about. Don't make her join the game, just to see that it's your peer group's version of a poker night or a book club. Maybe have the other spouses come along; when they get bored watching, they can go to lunch or a movie together.
Capitalism wins again!
I was also a sunrocket customer, but I was about 18 months into my "buy one year at $199, get the second year free" agreement when they went under. I figured it was the way of the world and didn't feel too badly about the price I had paid for the value received and moved on.
My friend was in a similar situation as yourself; only a few months into his contract. When the company went bankrupt, he contacted his credit card company about the problem. They issued him a complete refund of the $199.
Looking back, it was sheer madness on my part to pony up $199 upfront for a company with no long-term reputation like sunrocket. Also a lesson learned: let the credit card company take the risk, not me.
Let's not open up the can of worms that is the shifty circumstances in which Teleblend "acquired" all assets and customers of sunrocket...
Nobody divides by 1024!
Except those who don't have an understanding of binary numbers (i.e., "math").
Yes. More than anything, to be prepared for your future you need to know how to learn things. When faced with a problem, you can only solve it with the knowledge you have. The more knowledge you have, the better your options to adapt and lead those who do not.
Math was never my favorite or best subject, but along the way to the degree I wanted (Electrical Engineering) I had to take enough math classes that I found myself just one class shy of qualifying as well for a minor in Mathematics. Since then, I can count on one hand the times in my career I've needed to use more than the Algebra that I learned in high school, but in those few instances it's been quite handy knowing how to do a bit more.
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier - not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Think of your English classes. You probably won't need to quote Shakespeare or spell obscure words perfectly each day of your life. We learn those things because after your formal education, most people find a comfort zone in their day to day lives that is less than their absolute best. Most people get along just fine day-to-day using only a vocabulary of only 300-400 words, but on certain occasions having that expanded vocabulary available to draw on is important when an idea just can't be expressed any other way.
Someone who bench presses 300 pounds regularly will have no problem benching 200 any time. Someone who gave up training being satisfied with being able to push up 200 pounds once will struggle with it every time.
Only super geniuses work at their peak all the time, so for the rest of us chugging along at 70% effort, our best chance for success is to peak as high as possible so that our everyday performance is good, too.
If you're satisfied with the level of math that you know, push yourself one level more. You've got to be in school all day anyway, right? Might as well make it worthwhile. You can be bored in class going through the motions on things you find easy, or you could challenge yourself by doing something new. You'll never again have the chance to do that for free. As a bonus, my experience in high school was that the classes where the students had to choose and strive to be there were also more enjoyable because of the attitudes of both the class and teacher.
Remember: Broken gets fixed. Shoddy lasts forever.
Stem cells can be used to regrow teeth.
I long for the day.
I had one of my incisors broken out and the root severely injured when I was 14 or so. Since that time, I've endured a partial crown, a full crown, a root canal, and an apicoectomy before earlier this year my dentist and I decided it was finally really dying (I'm 36 now).
The tooth was extracted in February and the socket packed with cadaver bone, stitched over and left to heal for 3 months. In May, an implant was placed in the bone and then stitched over again, this time to wait for 4 months while the bone hopefully knits successfully around the implant. In a few more months I get to go back to have my gums cut open for the third time this year and have the post and crown installed. If the implant fails, then plan B involves more expense and time.
I imagine a brave, new, flying-car world of the future, where anything other than a routine cleaning at the dentist will mean an extraction and insertion of a small pellet in the gum that will cause a new tooth to grow within 3 months.
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_Q?id=nexus_q
"Phone or Tablet running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or higher with access to Google Play"
So pretty much anything running Android at this point.
Ah. Thanks for the correction.
The stereo amplifier was an odd decision. Peopler either already have an amp, or they don't have speakers. What's the point of having an amp that connects to my TV to play video if I can't direct the TV's sound through the amp?
A very odd decision, especially at the 25W power level. 25W is slightly better than the built-in speakers on the TV, but completely inadequate for audiophiles who would care about having separate speakers from their TV.
To be fair, you wouldn't have had to use an Android phone; you'd have to use an Android device. Think cheapest commodity hardware, running free software. Right now that's under $100 and before too long it will be under $40. "Remotes" are on the cusp of obsolescence, to be replaced by "smartremotes."
But yeah, $300 was way too much for a neato "smartamp" and the weird Google services lock-in made it not really even good for that kind of job.
Not just any Android device, you have to have something running Jellybean, which means exactly one device, so far.
The Android OS also uses a cut down user land and a cut down C runtime called BIONIC.
I hear these things like cut-down and lightweight. Honestly, how bloaty is the full glibc runtime and standard library? My 900MHz eee runs very nicely, and is now comparable in performance to high end phones.
Also, Linux ran very nicely with a full glibc on my P133 with 72M of RAM back in the day, the PII 400, then the PIII 850, then the P4 laptop, then eee, the Core i7 laptop...
I wonder at what point the "cut down" userland in Android is compared to the history of full userlands before.
I suspect that quite a bit of it is premature optimization.
You would be correct. The binaries for the runtimes are smaller, which is supposed to be good for both flash and RAM usage, but makes doing anything in C on an Android platform a royal nightmare. But, from Android's perspective that's OK, since you will be developing in Java anyway. The BIONIC library is custom-fit to include only the features that the Android team deemed necessary to get the system up to the point that developers can then use Java for applications.
If you have the displeasure of working at the Linux layer on an Android device, the first thing to do is install glibc and Busybox to bring peace to your soul.
This is something Microsoft should have undertaken immediately after acquiring Hotmail. Microsoft has a strong brand with Outlook, and it makes total sense to be using that brand for their webmail offering.
Doing it at this time also makes sense.
[...]
...they don't have a good history of execution on things like this--most likely the new platform will be horrible, but they'll keep at it
They'll keep at it, but it's as if they think everyone in the world is too stupid to remember how many times they'll fumble and reintroduce the same product with a different name every two years.
It continually amazes me when companies dump tons of money into acquiring a brand only to try their best to drive people away from using that brand rather than nurture the brand.
So which is it, Microsoft? Is it Hotmail, MSN, Live, or Outlook that you want me to think of when I want to check my e-mail? Going to Outlook.com redirects me to live.com to sign up. But, I don't use my "Windows Live ID" to login, I should now start calling it my "Microsoft account", even though I don't log in anywhere on microsoft.com with such a thing. Why not just give me a bing.com address? At least when people sent me mail there they would think of your other product.
Then again, this is the company that gave the same name to both a table and a tablet and spends marketing dollars to brand the sodas in their own cafeterias to educate their workforce on the names of their products.
just say nothing or excuse yourself.
its like getting questioned by a cop. nothing good can come from that. just say as little as you can and get the hell out of there as fast as you can.
this is a no-win situation and they try to sell it as a way to 'fix' things that need fixing. there is zero truth to that, I assure you.
please, for your own sake, bypass the exit interview. please. you will thank me years from now for this advice. I learned the hard way. you should not have to.
Spot on. If you're sitting in an exit interview, remember two things: 1. The relationship between yourself and the company is beyond salvage. Hopefully the relationship is ending on your terms, but even if it isn't, no feedback given here is going to make it better; it's just too late for that. 2. You don't work for the company anymore. You don't owe them your expertise, insights, or time. Take the high road and thank them for their employment, and leave it at that.
The HR representative might try to bluff you into agreeing to an interview, saying something like it's "required" or "mandatory" or even suggesting that your last paycheck might only be handed over as part of the interview, but it's all crap. If you don't show up, what can they do, fire you? They are legally required to pay out your last paycheck.