Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones | Hacker News Reader

Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones

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36 pointsgrellas25 comments

So I work at Microsoft. Specifically on the Windows team. I honestly can't say I've ever had any issues using my iPhone or MacBook Pro there.

During my interview we joked about how I had not used Windows (or any Microsoft product) in a serious capacity for over a decade. I run Apple on the desktop and Linux on servers. They seemed to like this diversity coming in on the team.

I joined a few months before Win7 shipped, and have to say... from day one I was pretty impressed with Win7. It's actually a really nice OS, I just wish the hardware it usually came on was as nice (I've yet to find a PC laptop as well designed as my MBP). The new Windows 7 phones though... wow they are amazing. Actually makes me consider replacing my iPhone, which Android just couldn't do.

I had the exact same experience joining Microsoft - I hadn't used Windows (or any Microsoft product) for 5 years.

MS is so huge that different areas of the company can be vary different. Still, the basic problem IMO is an upper management culture focused on appearance. From an eat your own dog food concept a team should use their own products, but not to the exclusion of all others. The goal is to understand what users want and how the product is broken, not just to make people look good. I work with MS products on a regular basis and like them, yet basic problems can continue for way to long.

EX: Most people in our office want to add Excel Graphs and then edit them and on average PowerPoint crashes around 4-5 times a day. This is fairly basic functionality that most poeple using PowerPoint in the workplace actually want and it just fails randomly way to often. But, I am not talking about a new issue this is several years old and it's not getting any better.

I really like Visual Studio + C# but anything past the most basic windows features and you get into voodoo land where you just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. I know I am looking for the happy path and I know I can find it but sometimes it's in a vary strange place.

This is the type of things eat your own dog food is supposed to fix, yet for some reason that's not happening.

PS: I still think many MS products are the best option for a lot of things. But, often it's the surface that's great, it's easy to install, it does the basics just fine, and the deeper you go the worse things look.

When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2003, I brought my PowerBook into work. Sometimes coworkers would give me shit, and I would offer to start using a windows laptop once they used MSN Search instead of Google for all their web searches.

At the time, MSN search was so bad that this proposition was ludicrous. In fact, every Office developer I knew used Google with a "site:msdn.microsoft.com" restriction to search their own API docs.

I wonder if Bing is now good enough that employees feel pressure to use it instead of Google.

There's no comparison. Search wasn't a big business for anyone then. Microsoft has been in the smartphone business for a while and it's an extremely sore subject.

It really comes down to this: why work at a company whose products you're not excited about? This is part of Google and Apple's success. You were an intern then, so you're fine, but more senior, high-level employees better be using your company products--otherwise, they're doing a shitty job and need to be fired.

"why work at a company whose products you're not excited about?"

Microsoft has a lot of products. It would be unnatural for every employee who worked there to be excited about every single one of those products. I can understand the cognitive dissonance issues of working in a division that produced products that you weren't excited about, but as for the entirety of Microsoft I think that's an unrealistic idea.

The only way to be excited equally about all of Microsoft's products (in preference to all of their competitors) is to have drunken the kool-aid so deeply that you've lost the ability to judge anything fairly. This is a far more dangerous scenario than a company that produces some products that are second run in comparison to some of their rivals. The former is a recipe for a company full of zealots who drive the company into the ground due to their lack of fair judgement, the former is to be expected of any company that has a huge and widely varied product offering spanning multiple industries.

The former (a company full of zealots who drive the company into the ground due to their lack of fair judgement) is a classic case of a late-stage company overtaken by the clueless, who survives simply by inertia.

Does that mean that msdn.microsoft.com performed acceptably in 2003 when you were on MS's network?

I've always found MSDN's online access to be dreadfully slow. The lack of a proper rich client - dynamically updating index in particular - for MSDN content in VS2010, so far, is disturbing to me - I generally find APIs using the index followed by contextual tree navigation, both of which don't work nearly as well in web apps.

>The perils of being an iPhone user at Microsoft were on display last September. At an all- company meeting in a Seattle sports stadium, one hapless employee used his iPhone to snap photos of Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. Mr. Ballmer snatched the iPhone out of the employee's hands, placed it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it in front of thousands of Microsoft workers, according to people present.

I was present for this. It was a self-deprecating joke, not an actual admonition, and Ballmer later addressed the fact that Microsoft just isn't competitive in mobile right now, and tried to hype up Windows Mobile 7 (as it was then known).

I worked at MSFT last summer, and I had an iPhone. So did my (full time) office mate. So did my mentor. I think my team's dev lead did too. Probably around 40-50% of my team did. It wasn't frowned upon at all. I also used Opera on my work machines and the most I encountered was curiosity.

Every time one of these "Microsofties can't use competitors' products" articles comes up I find it really frustrating, because it's at best an inaccurate generalization.

Exactly one fellow MSFT employee has ever given me guff for using my iPhone. I told him to shove it, and every other employee I've told the story to was mortified that anyone would act that way.

In a 100,000 person company, you're going to have some douches, but the vast majority of people couldn't care less what kind of phone you use.

If Ballmer was smart he would encourage the use of the iPhone and other competing phones, since that is the reality... Then tell employees to take notes from the form factor, software, usability, developer market and experience. He's completely backwards on this.

Right. I think that one thing is eating your own dog food, another is trying to forbid employees using rival technology (hopelessly, as we can read in this article).

I think this pisses off employees and this is the last thing Microsoft can afford right now. The best for them is to use both the iPhone and some Microsoft phone to take note of the differences and help improve the latter.

It's like forbidding one game developer playing the games of another, or even discussing them. Stupid.

I work at game studio, and all designers are researching and playing other games actively (be it owned by the parent company, or others).

I mean.... How else??

Steve Ballmer: What happens when the serial killer from "silence of the lambs" becomes when he escapes from prison and takes on a new identity.

But seriously, does Microsoft buy its employees Windows Mobile phone? No? That's why nobody has them; why pay money for an inferior product just because you work there? At least Google buys everyone an Android phone.

I work for a bank. I don't put my money in this bank, because their fees are outrageous and their interest rates are insanely low. ING Direct is a much better product, so I use that instead. There is no incentive for me to use my employer's product; it would cost me money. Why would I want to spend my own money to make the executives feel better?

I know it's off-topic, but why would you want to work for a company that treats its customers so badly? I mean, if they don't care about their customers they probably don't care much about you either, so it's entirely likely that you could do better working for someone who actually gives a fuck.

ING Direct's quite a bit different than your standard bank. I know a girl who works at Indigo (a book retailer)—she buys books via Amazon because she doesn't need the aisles of books to leaf through, staff assistance or in-store Starbucks or the markup associated with it.

I'm pretty sure this article is one of those filler pieces that are in the writer's back pocket in case he can't think of something else to write about.

I take my iPhone and MBP up to the Bellevue and Redmond offices all the time. I get some weird looks sometimes when I pull out the laptop in the cafeteria but when they see I'm running Windows 7 and I'm doing stuff on the intranet, their attitude turns to curiosity. I've had many questions like "How does CorpNet work on your Mac?" My usual response: "Very well."

Sure you can eat your own dog food or whatever the cool new term for this is but there's also something about using the tools that work well for the job. I don't really run anything important for work on my Mac. All of my code builds/runs on lab machines or a desktop that sits in the office which I can connect to via Remote Desktop Connection. My Mac works great as a thin client to these machines.

Microsoft seems a lot more tolerant of competing hardware than I expected. Somehow I doubt they're as relaxed about it in Cupertino.

That's a good question to pose to apple employees. I wonder if they can comment at all. :p But to their credit, as I discuss above, their loyalty is a big part of Apple's success.

Is that so? How about iTunes, QuickTime, WebObjects, BootCamp technologies? Apple surely knows that Windows is, and still is the most used OS. (And, I'm typing this from my MBP).

For the longest time, Steve Jobs himself didn't use a Mac. He used a ThinkPad with NeXTStep. I guess that's not really competing, though.

To be fair though, Apple did give all their employees an iPhone when they came out.

My first day at Microsoft, I was worried about this. This worry dissipated once I saw my boss's boss pull one out in a meeting.

Leaders are often insulated from reality by people around them, especially if they have a penchant for violent outbursts.

See the 'chair' incident and the movie 'Der Untergang'.

I'm sure Jobs and others in the industry have similar reality distortion fields around them.

But I highly doubt that at the lower levels in the microsoft organization they'd be this myopic, and a bunch of anecdotes here and elsewhere about microsoft employees owning hardware produced by competitors and displaying them openly at work seems to confirm that doubt.

A note for those of us who perhaps know "unter" but not "untergang": the official movie title English translation of Der Untergang is Downfall. My G<->E dictionary suggests setting, sinking, fig. ruin.

"Andy Lees, a Microsoft senior vice president who oversees development of the mobile-phone software business... explained that Microsoft workers often use rival products to better understand the competition"

If that was what he truly believed, then the mobile-phone division is in trouble, because their leader is completely out of touch with reality.

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