I worked for a manager once that didn't believe that anyone who practiced WFH actually worked when they were at home. His position was, you must be visibly in your cube to be considered to be working. Or, an employee at all. One might argue that just being seen at one's desk doesn't necessarily mean one is working, but I didn't make that argument, because I wanted to keep my job.
Yeah, obviously the guy never heard of presenteeism...
Man, no kidding. In a former job, a co-worker was actually, physically, coughing up blood but was too terrified of losing his job to take a sick day.
Several of us took sick days so we didn't have to be around him. (Long story short, he survived, but I guess it was a close thing.)
I understand the.. what term did you use?... outgoing dipshit in our case is now on the lecture circuit, on how to outsource. I guess he did a great job, depending on one's definition of same. Bonus for outsourcing, check. Golden parachute, check. Smoldering wreckage in the rear view mirror, check. Mission completed. Given how it worked out for him, maybe he wasn't such a dipshit....
Formatted on the company's personal computers and printed out on the company's best laser printer over the company's network, and I'd personally like to thank the company for providing all these resources, without which, it'd be a lot harder to find my way out of this hell hole.
not because it has a cute logo or a brushed metal case.
One reason you'll never "get it" is that you have zero empathy. You can't understand why anyone would make a choice you wouldn't, given the same information. That's your failing, not theirs. The iPad has some valuable features, even if you don't value them.
I'm sure they do. We do business on ipads, although I personally declined to be issued one. But people don't wait all night in the rain to replace a perfectly useful device for an incremental improvement for hundreds of dollars for "some valuable features", unless those words doesn't mean what they used to. Another indication that we don't mean the same thing about "valuable features" is that I apparently need empathy to understand this.
And geeze, we weren't even talking about ipads. You *did* read past the first line of my post, didn't you? Regardless of what I personally think of them, I recognize that people use Apple products because they want to, and they use Microsoft products because they have to. I'm not really interested in either, but given a binary choice, I'd take an ipad any day over a Surface.
Nod. We are both describing legacy, shrinking markets. It sounds like our only disagreement is how fast they're shrinking. I work for an ancient blue chip company, and they converted entirely to salesforce two years ago. Appears to be working well enough.
We have exactly no Windows slates. ipads are popular amongst the execs, so we struggle a little to make them usable. Shrug. Your mileage, as always, may vary, but I see a determined effort to get away from being locked into clients that only run on Windows. It has to be said, driven partly by IE6's death grip on earlier webapps, (you were on target there) and partly on Vista anxiety. (My term for the company's concern that Microsoft will continue to crap out an OS that's not a good fit in the enterprise. We're still running XP, skipped Vista, only now converting to Win7, going to skip Win8.)
We have no plan in place to even consider a pilot program to look at eventually doing anything on a Windows slate. On the other hand, we're doing operations on the ipad RIGHT NOW. Had Microsoft come out a few years ago with a product that people actually wanted to touch, things might have been different. Or maybe not; there continues to be more than one reason to back away from dependence on Windows.
Add: Lack of context. Silo A and Silo B of the outsourcing company don't talk to you, but they also don't talk to each other. In a complex, multi-platform environment, we're always getting one offshore group pulling the rug out from under a different offshore group, or informing the wrong group that a resource is going away. For instance, the DBA group taking down a database that's the back end for an upgrade the Application group is trying to do. We're told it's all supposed to go through change control, but as it's all offshore, they could be writing change notices on the back of candy wrappers and we'd never know.
And because they tend to move on as soon as they get enough experience to get better jobs, the situation never gets better, because nobody sticks around long enough to get a feeling for how things fit together.
Saying they're considering outsourcing might be seen as a good move to encourage attrition and reduce IT costs... if YOU'RE A COMPLETE MORON.
Consider: When outsourcing is in the air, employees can be easily divided in the following classes by what action they take or don't take.
(a) The professional. He sees the handwriting on the wall, and immediately starts soliciting headhunters and calling in favors to get interviews. He does this RIGHT AWAY because the longer he waits, the more competition he'll have from former co-workers. He will be gone soon.
(b) The Wally. He has been gliding along on inertia over the past several years, has no usable current skills, and no hope of convincing people otherwise. He's doomed. He'll stick around, but whatever help he'll give during transition will be hampered by the fact that he has nothing to contribute. He may slip into another job through sheer luck.
(c) The scaredy cat. He may have useful skills, but is afraid to make the leap into interviewing, so he'll wait until it's way too late to start looking in the vain hope that his master will retain him or maybe call the whole outsourcing thing off. He'll contribute to the best of his ability during the transition in the vain hope that the company will appreciate this (they won't) and find a way to retain him (extremely unlikely).
So other than the increasingly hysterical output from sparsely populated category (c), brain drain commences immediately and tribal knowledge flies off the premises. The company ends up with a much smaller IT department, achieving the goal, (oooh, managerial bonus!) but with the unintended consequence of becoming a much smaller company.
There really is a reason why companies make the announcement ahead of time before outsourcing. Really, there is. It's part of the formula. The outsourcing company sells the patsy... client, sorry. Sells the client on the idea that the client tells their employees that they're planning to outsource, so that the employees can then be directed to spend their remaining time in documenting their jobs well enough that an untrained person in a third world country could do the job.
The outsourcing company will insist on this, and the sap, ur... client for God only knows what reason will think this will actually work, and the employees will go "sure, yeah, that's what I'm doing with my remaining time here. Sure. Not spending my entire shift looking for a job in a down economy. No sirree. My job doesn't take any original thought, creativity, or diagnostic skills, it's just a lot of button pushing and answering questions. Here, let me print out... say... everything in My Documents. That should stack up real nice."
...so all the regular employees exit carrying their sad cardboard boxes, cutover occurs, and it's a disaster.
...and the outsourcing company says, it's all the abused spouse's... there I go again! Sorry... it's all the client's fault, for not documenting their processes well enough. And for some reason the client will BELIEVE THIS ALSO. So the outsourcing company will say, we can't do this job as originally bid, it'll require many more 3rd and 4th level people (IE, people with actual skills and experience) and will cost more. A lot more.
Five years later, the outsourcing company will assure the chump... what's wrong with this spell checker? CLIENT. The client, that the break-even point is just around the corner, really it is, and will volunteer to help sell this concept to the board. Meanwhile, the victim's argh... client's business has suffered, it's harder to do even the smallest office task, change in any reasonable amount of time is impossible, and employees are saying things like "for God's sake, please don't make me call the helpdesk".
I think OP is right in that droid buyers are more likely to buy a tablet to fill a specific need or set of needs, and not because it has a cute logo or a brushed metal case.
I think you're right in that if MS wants to be a premium product, it has to be a product that people *want*, not necessarily *need*.
And that's where it falls apart. People use Windows because they have no choice. This had been true for so long that Microsoft is unable to design a product under any other criteria than (a) "you'll use it because it vaguely resembles Windows (WinCE, Windows Mobile, Surface RT) and (b) "you'll take what we give you and like it, because all your apps run on our stuff". (Surface Pro/every other MS operating system). And you know, neither of those criteria are valid anymore. People are finding out they *do* have a choice, and they are exercising same.
The only people that care are the ipad buyers who want to buy an ipad because its an ipad, and few could even articulate why they want an ipad instead of an alternative, except that they "know" that's the one they want.
The people buying droid tablets largely don't care that its droid. Sure, some of US do, but that's beside the point.
All true.
MS can easily take a bite out of the android market by competing on price, if they want.
Um, maybe. I guess anyone will buy anything if it's cheap enough, but Win8 is a hard sell.
MS can also go after the premium market with the competitive advantage the Surface 2 Pro has -- the ability to run windows / desktop apps.
And there you lost me.
And -yes- this IS something there is a market for. One company I work with for example has all it's outbound reps using laptops to enter sales etc. The reps are clamoring to switch to a tablet for portability etc. Sure the point of sale system vendor could come around with a web interface or ios/droid client at some point, but today that doesn't exist.
There are those who would disagree. If your sales software is a thick client bound to Windows, you're about a decade behind the times, chum. Modern sales interfaces are html based, and friendly (or, at least, no more unfriendly) towards tablets as they are laptops.
So the surface pro works for them today. Microsoft can go after and capture that market, even at 'premium' prices.
They can make all the products they want, but the software that people want runs on an OS owned by someone else.
What software is there that's exclusively on ios or droid that you think "people want to run"? Reality is people don't care about that. ipad has its brand name cachet, and droid has the open community, but the average person? Doesn't REALLY care; and the business user? Could very well see a lot of advantages to windows tablets if microsoft puts out a competent product.
Um, again, as many have said, if Microsoft had come out with this several years ago, they might have made a dent in the market. But these days? The scenario only applies to legacy systems. It's a new product intending to fill a shrinking niche. Not where a successful company wants to be.
Is it just me, or does anybody have the feeling that this job is probably the opposite of the title?
Yeah, it sounds like a fancy name for media liaison. When the local police department was misbehaving, (I mean, more than usual) it was the job of the media liaison to minimize the damage. I'm sure this is something similar. We see a lot of this lately -- lip service to citizen concerns that are actually attempts to control the narrative.
Ever give a thought to a compressed work week of 4x10-hours instead of 5x8-hours? You could also try 3.5x12-hours (3x12 one week, 4x12 the next week) but that kind of schedule works better when you need 24/7 coverage.
My impression is that companies argue (at least to themselves) why do I need to offer 4x10 when I'm already getting 5x10? I'd just be letting them take another day off.
I worked for a manager once that didn't believe that anyone who practiced WFH actually worked when they were at home. His position was, you must be visibly in your cube to be considered to be working. Or, an employee at all. One might argue that just being seen at one's desk doesn't necessarily mean one is working, but I didn't make that argument, because I wanted to keep my job.
In fact, I find that after the distractions of the office are gone, either because I am working at home or everybody has gone home, I can get a lot more done.
Agreed. I'm the most productive when everyone else has gone home. But I pay for it by being dull and generally unresponsive the next morning. I'm thinking it's like the old proverb, you can't make a string longer by cutting off a piece and tying it to the other end.
I think what we're saying is that there are productive hours and hours that you're required to... be there... and they're not necessarily the same hours.
The collateral damage of staying late is that the company will start *expecting* you to stay late.....
It would save even more if 99% of what could be interchangeable parts on every car, weren't completely redesigned for each model. That little plastic squirter can be the same on every car that uses a plastic squirter on the headlights.
Can you imagine how it would be if each model had entirely redesigned spark plugs or wind shield wipers?
I completely agree, and I wonder why this (commonality of parts) isn't done more often. It has the benefit of reduced parts inventory, reduced mechanic training, and overall less paperwork and less churn.
(Side note -- speaking as the owner of a car that uses an obscure wiper, I'd like to say, there are entirely too many types of windshield wipers out there.)
I mean, holy crap, it doesn't make any sense at all that a plastic glove box door, probably $1.20 in materials, no moving parts, no *assembly* even, should cost between $100 (aftermarket) and $250 (dealer) to replace. Part of that is gouging, of course, but they'd argue that parts is that the piece in question is unique to only a few model years. A different type of glove box door for a design that had a much longer lifespan was only $39.
I think the moral is, low volume items should be printable. End of story.
I hear you. The plastic handle on my daughter's VW Bug glove compartment has broken off. The handle just snaps into place, but the dealer doesn't sell just the handle, you have to buy the entire compartment door. But it's just a piece of plastic about 8 inches by 6, how much could it cost? Over $100. We really need to be able to print things like that.
Have you used wp8? I have a wp8 handset and having used android and ios, can say that MS have come out trumps with wp8.. its another matter that they aren't winning (yet and possibly never will) but that's to be seen. android has so many issues, it is no fun to use. Once you lay your hands on a wp8 device, you can tell how much a copy android is of ios.
No, I haven't owned a Windows Phone 8 phone. I have a Windows 8 slate. I got frustrated with it and stopped using it. I'm thinking of installing Android/x86 on it. If wp8 works great for you, then... great. That's why they make different kinds of products, because there are different kinds of people. Not enough, apparently, to make a Windows phone a substantial success...
Slashdot Mirror
'Brushed metal and logos' is now code-speak for Apple-hate?
Oh, come on.
It's the new politics.
I worked for a manager once that didn't believe that anyone who practiced WFH actually worked when they were at home. His position was, you must be visibly in your cube to be considered to be working. Or, an employee at all. One might argue that just being seen at one's desk doesn't necessarily mean one is working, but I didn't make that argument, because I wanted to keep my job.
Yeah, obviously the guy never heard of presenteeism...
Man, no kidding. In a former job, a co-worker was actually, physically, coughing up blood but was too terrified of losing his job to take a sick day.
Several of us took sick days so we didn't have to be around him. (Long story short, he survived, but I guess it was a close thing.)
I understand the .. what term did you use? ... outgoing dipshit in our case is now on the lecture circuit, on how to outsource. I guess he did a great job, depending on one's definition of same. Bonus for outsourcing, check. Golden parachute, check. Smoldering wreckage in the rear view mirror, check. Mission completed. Given how it worked out for him, maybe he wasn't such a dipshit....
Formatted on the company's personal computers and printed out on the company's best laser printer over the company's network, and I'd personally like to thank the company for providing all these resources, without which, it'd be a lot harder to find my way out of this hell hole.
not because it has a cute logo or a brushed metal case.
One reason you'll never "get it" is that you have zero empathy. You can't understand why anyone would make a choice you wouldn't, given the same information. That's your failing, not theirs. The iPad has some valuable features, even if you don't value them.
I'm sure they do. We do business on ipads, although I personally declined to be issued one. But people don't wait all night in the rain to replace a perfectly useful device for an incremental improvement for hundreds of dollars for "some valuable features", unless those words doesn't mean what they used to. Another indication that we don't mean the same thing about "valuable features" is that I apparently need empathy to understand this.
And geeze, we weren't even talking about ipads. You *did* read past the first line of my post, didn't you? Regardless of what I personally think of them, I recognize that people use Apple products because they want to, and they use Microsoft products because they have to. I'm not really interested in either, but given a binary choice, I'd take an ipad any day over a Surface.
Nod. We are both describing legacy, shrinking markets. It sounds like our only disagreement is how fast they're shrinking. I work for an ancient blue chip company, and they converted entirely to salesforce two years ago. Appears to be working well enough.
We have exactly no Windows slates. ipads are popular amongst the execs, so we struggle a little to make them usable. Shrug. Your mileage, as always, may vary, but I see a determined effort to get away from being locked into clients that only run on Windows. It has to be said, driven partly by IE6's death grip on earlier webapps, (you were on target there) and partly on Vista anxiety. (My term for the company's concern that Microsoft will continue to crap out an OS that's not a good fit in the enterprise. We're still running XP, skipped Vista, only now converting to Win7, going to skip Win8.)
We have no plan in place to even consider a pilot program to look at eventually doing anything on a Windows slate. On the other hand, we're doing operations on the ipad RIGHT NOW. Had Microsoft come out a few years ago with a product that people actually wanted to touch, things might have been different. Or maybe not; there continues to be more than one reason to back away from dependence on Windows.
Add: Lack of context. Silo A and Silo B of the outsourcing company don't talk to you, but they also don't talk to each other. In a complex, multi-platform environment, we're always getting one offshore group pulling the rug out from under a different offshore group, or informing the wrong group that a resource is going away. For instance, the DBA group taking down a database that's the back end for an upgrade the Application group is trying to do. We're told it's all supposed to go through change control, but as it's all offshore, they could be writing change notices on the back of candy wrappers and we'd never know.
And because they tend to move on as soon as they get enough experience to get better jobs, the situation never gets better, because nobody sticks around long enough to get a feeling for how things fit together.
Saying they're considering outsourcing might be seen as a good move to encourage attrition and reduce IT costs... if YOU'RE A COMPLETE MORON.
Consider: When outsourcing is in the air, employees can be easily divided in the following classes by what action they take or don't take.
(a) The professional. He sees the handwriting on the wall, and immediately starts soliciting headhunters and calling in favors to get interviews. He does this RIGHT AWAY because the longer he waits, the more competition he'll have from former co-workers. He will be gone soon.
(b) The Wally. He has been gliding along on inertia over the past several years, has no usable current skills, and no hope of convincing people otherwise. He's doomed. He'll stick around, but whatever help he'll give during transition will be hampered by the fact that he has nothing to contribute. He may slip into another job through sheer luck.
(c) The scaredy cat. He may have useful skills, but is afraid to make the leap into interviewing, so he'll wait until it's way too late to start looking in the vain hope that his master will retain him or maybe call the whole outsourcing thing off. He'll contribute to the best of his ability during the transition in the vain hope that the company will appreciate this (they won't) and find a way to retain him (extremely unlikely).
So other than the increasingly hysterical output from sparsely populated category (c), brain drain commences immediately and tribal knowledge flies off the premises. The company ends up with a much smaller IT department, achieving the goal, (oooh, managerial bonus!) but with the unintended consequence of becoming a much smaller company.
There really is a reason why companies make the announcement ahead of time before outsourcing. Really, there is. It's part of the formula. The outsourcing company sells the patsy... client, sorry. Sells the client on the idea that the client tells their employees that they're planning to outsource, so that the employees can then be directed to spend their remaining time in documenting their jobs well enough that an untrained person in a third world country could do the job.
The outsourcing company will insist on this, and the sap, ur... client for God only knows what reason will think this will actually work, and the employees will go "sure, yeah, that's what I'm doing with my remaining time here. Sure. Not spending my entire shift looking for a job in a down economy. No sirree. My job doesn't take any original thought, creativity, or diagnostic skills, it's just a lot of button pushing and answering questions. Here, let me print out ... say ... everything in My Documents. That should stack up real nice."
Five years later, the outsourcing company will assure the chump... what's wrong with this spell checker? CLIENT. The client, that the break-even point is just around the corner, really it is, and will volunteer to help sell this concept to the board. Meanwhile, the victim's argh... client's business has suffered, it's harder to do even the smallest office task, change in any reasonable amount of time is impossible, and employees are saying things like "for God's sake, please don't make me call the helpdesk".
And this will be called Progress.
I think OP is right in that droid buyers are more likely to buy a tablet to fill a specific need or set of needs, and not because it has a cute logo or a brushed metal case.
I think you're right in that if MS wants to be a premium product, it has to be a product that people *want*, not necessarily *need*.
And that's where it falls apart. People use Windows because they have no choice. This had been true for so long that Microsoft is unable to design a product under any other criteria than (a) "you'll use it because it vaguely resembles Windows (WinCE, Windows Mobile, Surface RT) and (b) "you'll take what we give you and like it, because all your apps run on our stuff". (Surface Pro/every other MS operating system). And you know, neither of those criteria are valid anymore. People are finding out they *do* have a choice, and they are exercising same.
People don't want Microsoft on their tablet.
The only people that care are the ipad buyers who want to buy an ipad because its an ipad, and few could even articulate why they want an ipad instead of an alternative, except that they "know" that's the one they want.
The people buying droid tablets largely don't care that its droid. Sure, some of US do, but that's beside the point.
All true.
MS can easily take a bite out of the android market by competing on price, if they want.
Um, maybe. I guess anyone will buy anything if it's cheap enough, but Win8 is a hard sell.
MS can also go after the premium market with the competitive advantage the Surface 2 Pro has -- the ability to run windows / desktop apps.
And there you lost me.
And -yes- this IS something there is a market for. One company I work with for example has all it's outbound reps using laptops to enter sales etc. The reps are clamoring to switch to a tablet for portability etc. Sure the point of sale system vendor could come around with a web interface or ios/droid client at some point, but today that doesn't exist.
There are those who would disagree. If your sales software is a thick client bound to Windows, you're about a decade behind the times, chum. Modern sales interfaces are html based, and friendly (or, at least, no more unfriendly) towards tablets as they are laptops.
So the surface pro works for them today. Microsoft can go after and capture that market, even at 'premium' prices.
They can make all the products they want, but the software that people want runs on an OS owned by someone else.
What software is there that's exclusively on ios or droid that you think "people want to run"? Reality is people don't care about that. ipad has its brand name cachet, and droid has the open community, but the average person? Doesn't REALLY care; and the business user? Could very well see a lot of advantages to windows tablets if microsoft puts out a competent product.
Um, again, as many have said, if Microsoft had come out with this several years ago, they might have made a dent in the market. But these days? The scenario only applies to legacy systems. It's a new product intending to fill a shrinking niche. Not where a successful company wants to be.
> It's an open field and Microsoft has to compete on it's own merits
Nine million is still three times the fans of the most recent season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Is it just me, or does anybody have the feeling that this job is probably the opposite of the title?
Yeah, it sounds like a fancy name for media liaison. When the local police department was misbehaving, (I mean, more than usual) it was the job of the media liaison to minimize the damage. I'm sure this is something similar. We see a lot of this lately -- lip service to citizen concerns that are actually attempts to control the narrative.
"Tanks are rolling into Chicago... but first, Kim Kardashian wiggles her ass at the camera again."
I absolutely agree. When talking about the number of hours worked, for any creative process, you're almost certainly asking the wrong question.
Ever give a thought to a compressed work week of 4x10-hours instead of 5x8-hours? You could also try 3.5x12-hours (3x12 one week, 4x12 the next week) but that kind of schedule works better when you need 24/7 coverage.
My impression is that companies argue (at least to themselves) why do I need to offer 4x10 when I'm already getting 5x10? I'd just be letting them take another day off.
I worked for a manager once that didn't believe that anyone who practiced WFH actually worked when they were at home. His position was, you must be visibly in your cube to be considered to be working. Or, an employee at all. One might argue that just being seen at one's desk doesn't necessarily mean one is working, but I didn't make that argument, because I wanted to keep my job.
In fact, I find that after the distractions of the office are gone, either because I am working at home or everybody has gone home, I can get a lot more done.
Agreed. I'm the most productive when everyone else has gone home. But I pay for it by being dull and generally unresponsive the next morning. I'm thinking it's like the old proverb, you can't make a string longer by cutting off a piece and tying it to the other end.
I think what we're saying is that there are productive hours and hours that you're required to ... be there ... and they're not necessarily the same hours.
The collateral damage of staying late is that the company will start *expecting* you to stay late.....
It would save even more if 99% of what could be interchangeable parts on every car, weren't completely redesigned for each model. That little plastic squirter can be the same on every car that uses a plastic squirter on the headlights.
Can you imagine how it would be if each model had entirely redesigned spark plugs or wind shield wipers?
I completely agree, and I wonder why this (commonality of parts) isn't done more often. It has the benefit of reduced parts inventory, reduced mechanic training, and overall less paperwork and less churn.
(Side note -- speaking as the owner of a car that uses an obscure wiper, I'd like to say, there are entirely too many types of windshield wipers out there.)
I mean, holy crap, it doesn't make any sense at all that a plastic glove box door, probably $1.20 in materials, no moving parts, no *assembly* even, should cost between $100 (aftermarket) and $250 (dealer) to replace. Part of that is gouging, of course, but they'd argue that parts is that the piece in question is unique to only a few model years. A different type of glove box door for a design that had a much longer lifespan was only $39.
I think the moral is, low volume items should be printable. End of story.
Yep. Intel FDIV bug, 1994; some prime number calculations are "innaccurate".
Intel Logical Human Interaction Processor anomoly, 2023; a town of 500 is wiped out.
503. :-)
(For people who went to public school, 503 is prime.)
I hear you. The plastic handle on my daughter's VW Bug glove compartment has broken off. The handle just snaps into place, but the dealer doesn't sell just the handle, you have to buy the entire compartment door. But it's just a piece of plastic about 8 inches by 6, how much could it cost? Over $100. We really need to be able to print things like that.
It would save even more if the end user could print it on site.
I wonder if they'd be running Windows for Killer Robots?
Let's hope so, because you would be able to press the Killbot's Start button to shut it down.
I hope you're right. On the other hand...
"The killbot has gone berserk! Shut it down! Shut it down!"
"I'm trying! What the hell is a 'charms bar'??"
Um, lessee... sometimes the only way to win is to not use 8 bit registers... na, I got nuthin'.
Have you used wp8? I have a wp8 handset and having used android and ios, can say that MS have come out trumps with wp8..
its another matter that they aren't winning (yet and possibly never will) but that's to be seen.
android has so many issues, it is no fun to use. Once you lay your hands on a wp8 device, you can tell how much a copy android is of ios.
No, I haven't owned a Windows Phone 8 phone. I have a Windows 8 slate. I got frustrated with it and stopped using it. I'm thinking of installing Android/x86 on it. If wp8 works great for you, then... great. That's why they make different kinds of products, because there are different kinds of people. Not enough, apparently, to make a Windows phone a substantial success...