Microsoft dissuades employees from owning iPhones
The iPhone is a brilliant piece of equipment. It’s the one Apple product that I, as an Apple hater, would love to own. And there are clearly some Microsoft employees who feel the same way. Which clearly isn’t on. Especially when Microsoft was paying for these employees to own a slice of the competition.
Microsoft has finally started to accept that this recession is hitting even the largest of companies, itself included. Which is why it embarked on a huge cost-saving initiative earlier this year. Not before time either, with April seeing Microsoft posting its first ever year-on-year decline in revenue since it went public in 1986.
The culling of thousands of employees, the loss of the company picnic, and the scaling back of product lines are well-known and well-reported results of these measures. But there was another smaller, less significant but juicy and fun consequence to tightening the purse strings.
As reported by Silicon Alley Insider today, Microsoft is now no longer paying for data plans for employees who own any cellphone other than one which operates Windows Mobile. That means employees who choose the Apple iPhone, the Blackberry RIM, or the new Palm Pre are now out in the cold.
This isn’t unusual for a company of Microsoft’s size, with many standardizing to one or two mobile operating systems and only offering to cover expenses for those employees using those. But this is Microsoft, and it’s pushing its clunky and unpopular Windows Mobile OS on its employees, therefore depriving them of being able to have taste and choosing an alternative model.
I just wonder how many Microsoft employees have made the switch to a Windows Mobile device in order to keep receiving the subsidy. It must be a kind of Sophie’s Choice between deciding whether to pay for your own smartphone in order to have an iPhone or putting up with an inferior product in order to get it for free. Those poor Microsoft employees.
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June 17th, 2009
“But this is Microsoft, and it’s pushing its clunky and unpopular Windows Mobile OS on its employees, therefore depriving them of being able to have taste [sic] and choosing [sic] an alternative model.”
This reminds me of the former East Germany – a “workers’ paradise” that was so wonderful that they needed a wall to keep their people from leaving en masse.