Microsoft legislates against iPhones
The dirty little secret at Microsoft (and at Red Hat, for that matter) has been the rise of the iPhone within employee ranks.
It's one thing to try to impose one's technology on an unsuspecting market, but Microsoft employees know that the iPhone makes their Windows Mobile devices look like Tinkertoys, which is why it's so easy to find iPhones at Microsoft's Redmond campus.
Or has been. In a relatively recent move, as The Business Insider reports, Microsoft has cut off reimbursements for data plans other than those linked to Windows Mobile devices. The move was ostensibly made to cut costs but likely also intended to save face by ensuring company employees use company technology.
It's a noble attempt to impose change through legislation. Perhaps Microsoft has learned something from European regulators.
Not that Microsoft is alone in trying to restrict choice. Microsoft enthusiast groups like the JCXP site are calling for a ban on the Opera browser to protest its involvement in recent European Commission antitrust proceedings. It's unclear whether the protesters will actually be able to find any Opera users to persuade away from the browser.
But good luck all the same.
There was a day when Microsoft was so impervious to competition that actions like this would have been unthinkable. Those days are gone. Microsoft is still dominant, but it's becoming clearer every day that there are mainstream alternatives to Microsoft technology that are clearly better than its own offerings.
Rather than legislating change, Microsoft could try innovating change. Those who can, compete....
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
First of all, that Microsoft is not a legislative body, and therefeore can't make laws or legislate.
Secondly, Microsoft is not stopping anyone from using iPhones if they want. What Microsoft is saying is : If you are a Microsoft employee and you wanna use iPhones, you pay for it yourself. Don't exepect Microsoft to use shareholders money to subsidize a competitor's products, by paying for your expensive iPhone and expensive data plans.
This is no more or less than what practically ever car company on the planet has been doing for decades. Toyota never subsdize their executives to go buy/rent Honda' with company money for official duties. Neither does Ford, GM or Nissan .
The real outrage here is why Microsoft was subsidizing iPhones for their employees in the first place. That should never have been allowed to happen
From article :"It's one thing to try to impose one's technology on an unsuspecting market"
Ummm..last time I checked, no one holds a gun to anyone's head when they go to Best Buy to go buy a computer. They use their own free will, to walk past the Apple Macs and go buy better configured, better priced Windows PC's 90% of the time.
Contrary to what the open source high priests would have you believe, the public is not as stupid as the open source crazies would have you believe. People work hard for their money, and are not prepared to hand over a big chunk of their pay to Apple for their overpriced Mac's.
"It's one thing to try to impose one's technology on an unsuspecting market", does not refer to shopping at Best Buy. It refers to such tactics as "embrace and extend" used by Microsoft to lock people down to it's own technologies.
As for your last two sentences, what does open source have to do with overpriced Macs?
Also I am too "overpriced" to loose my time tinkering with the settings of a "better priced" Windows PC!
My meter is running! So are my clients' meters!
Judging from the length of you troll, yours' obviously isnt!
Apparently anyone who disagrees with the Church of Jobs is a troll now? Interesting.
Freedom of choice sometimes has its downside. You can't have it both ways.
While you are correct, what it does to is make it more difficult for the user. Most people wouldnt know how to install a new browser if it was done for them. Now they are going to get a PC without a browser to even download IE or the competition if they would like to. Hopefully PC makers will add that on their own or include an install disk with the shipments.
I think this is partially the EU's fault because they are a little arbitrary but there were other ways around this for MS then just leaving the customer high and dry. What they should have done is preloaded IE and at least Firefox or one other browser and gave the customer a choice. Since MS is so large I am betting most of the people would have picked IE anyway because they dont know anything else.
@Vegaman-Dan
While you are correct, what it does to is make it more difficult for the user.
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Yup, that seems to be the new M.O. for M$. Consider UAC, which was designed to be as annoying as possible to punish the user into complaining to the developers that weren't playing ball with M$.
Slaves don't complain much when they're being beaten for no good reason. Why would they - they're slaves after all!
What do you think UAC is, a HIPS firewall like ZoneAlarm or Comodo? No, it's an authentication mechanism, just like those in the platforms Mac OS and Linux that you pretend to think are so great.
If you have no browser, how do you get online to exercise you choice to download and install *any* browser?
You've pretty much misconstrued the article on every point you tried to make.
...Microsoft is still dominant, but it's becoming clearer every day that there are mainstream alternatives to Microsoft technology that are clearly better than its own offerings.
Rather than legislating change, Microsoft could try innovating change. Those who can, compete...."
Then I must have misunderstood this. I thought he was pointing out how Microsoft was in this position because their products are falling behind.
These are the blogger's thoughts and opinions and nothing else. Don't get Matt's blog posts confused with actual news. They don't have to be vetted, or backed up with any evidence whatsoever.
Matt believes their products are failing, but that's just his opinion. He's free to say the sky is falling too with exactly as much legitimacy behind it.
Every company right now is cutting on phone expenses, cutting blackberries and other phones, especially given that very few employes except those that travel actually need them!
Does it make sense for microsoft to stop paying for employes' iphone data plan when they generally don't need it (what with being in front of a computer all day anyway) and it doesn't contribute to testing the company's own product? absolutely.
Anyone?
Anyone?
Bueller?
Ferris Bueller?
This really is not a big deal to anyone other than the understandable frustration of those Microsoft workers who can no longer enjoy the privilege their co-workers received previous to this edict.
Does Apple pay for employees who have WinMo or BBs?
Why is this even news or why does anyone care. Microsoft doesn't want to pay to support a competitors product. End of sentence/story. I'm pretty sure this is standard practice for just about every company out there.
Yes they would. However, good luck finding any Apple employees that use WinMo or BBs.
Worthless - feel sorry for CNET they have such a biased writers.
I assume the reason that CNET bloggers write such articles is akin to siding with all the people who have spent years frustrated with the clunky, bloated, unintuitive offerings that Microsoft has shipped out to the masses.
"The article is written clearly to expose another example of desperate lameness on the part of Microsoft." guy, are you serious? how it is lame for a company to cut back on cost? I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT saved $900,000 a year from this move.
Maybe Cnet should do a little research and find out how much MSFT will save because of this.
Moreover, large enterprises usually require employees to use standard devices, such as *particular models* of BBs or WinMo, etc. The reason is to cut IT procurement and support costs. Another reason is relates to information security. iPhones in particular are usually banned because there is no provision to encrypt data at the filesystem level (unlike BB, for example).
But as usual Matt displays his ignorance and chooses to write bizarre Microsoft-bashing articles instead of anything remotely related to Open Source.
I wish CNET would CONSIDER replacing this excuse for a blogger with someone who actually lives and breathes open source, instead of someone who's a shill for proprietary Apple products. There's so much going on in the open source world, new exciting features from Python, Apache, PHP, Linux, Ruby, FreeBSD... none ever get mentioned here!!
The dig at Red Hat seems a bit misplaced in the opening sentence. Red Hat doesn't compete in the cellphone space at all. By the logic introduced in this article and the linked article , Red Hat employees would have to choose not to use any cellphone technology at work to satisfy implied standards of company loyalty. Matt, that's just not a rational argument to try to make. A count of iphone usage at Google would be a better comparison with Microsoft's internal usage now that Android is all the rage.
-jef
But I fully expect you to follow the herd and find a way to link every Microsoft story to their impending downfall, instead of writing something that anyone gives a crap about. Thanks for the interesting read on corporate cellular reimbursement policy though.
Some of the weaknesses appear to be hardware related, which means all current iPhones can always be subverted. Even if the 3G S fixes them, no one can be confident there wont be others.
As a colleague likes to say, the iPhone lacks "defense-in-depth". It takes just one software or hardware vulnerability to defeat its entire security architecture.
Without a doubt, I would NEVER buy a phone, or a computer, or a TV, or a car, or a house, or a pair of pants, or a peanut butter & jelly sandwich that I wasn't 100% sure it was secure first & foremost. No use in making a call much less having a phone unless it's 100% secure!
/
Where do you come up with this stuff? Are you by any chance a Limbaugh fan?
If you find some fellow who likes to write his atm code on his card, you shouldn't blame the bank for being insecure!
The move by Microsoft makes sense from multiple angles:
#1: Employees still retain a choice of which device to use, however if they've chosen a competitors product they must pay for it themselves.
#2: Reduced cost in support
#3: Employees using WinMo devices who are not satisfied with WinMo for whatever reason can WORK ON CHANGING AND IMPROVING WINMO.
#4: Less MS money going to help Steve Jobs rule the world.
Not reimbursing employees for purchases/rentals of a competetors product is standard operating procedure. Instead of condemning microsoft for finally taking this position, you should be praising them for having allowed it for so long, and for finally taking a stand which encourages #3, above.
- by Constable Odo June 16, 2009 3:54 PM PDT
- Ballmer can suck it. I can't wait to see his next dance of developers, developers, developers and none of them are there because they've all gone to the iPhone/iPod Touch platform.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (48 Comments)If his employees want to use iPhones he should let them use it and he himself volunteer to pay for it because it's the only thing that will increase their productivity. Just because Bill Gates won't let any of his family use iPhones, there's no reason to try to stop every Microsoft employee to stop using them by making them pay out of their own pocket. I'm sure they don't want to use that grungy WinMo OS which will try to copy OSX Mobile and will fail miserably. Yeah, what Microsoft is doing is standard practice and makes sense but I just like to rub MS's nose into the doodoo merely to lighten my mood. Haha.