From fimoculous

Summary: Microsoft pressures its employees not to buy from Microsoft's competition

Microsoft may soon be debt-saddled (if it is not secretly debt-saddled already), but the following article was interesting not due to Microsoft's cutting of expenses but rather because the company is pressuring employees to use Microsoft products.

Microsofties lose their iPhones

Microsoft's cost-cutting measures are costing more than just jobs at the software giant - staff are also having to give up their iPhones and BlackBerries.

If employees want to hang onto the devices they'll have to pay for their own data subscriptions. Redmond will only pick up the bill for a Windows Mobile device - not Palm, not Android, not RIM and certainly not any Mac-based gadgets.

Shades of Microsoft's open source xenophobia and amnesty bins (for iPods). This shows a company which is intolerant of competition.

In other news, SJVN wrote about "The five best things about Vista SP2." Remember Vista? The operating system Microsoft wants you to forget about?

What are the five best things about Vista SP2?

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

Sorry. I couldn't resist.

On Sunday we looked at two weeks of news headlines, aggregating about 1,500 items. Among those, only 4 contained "Vista" in the headline; over 60 contained "Windows 7" in the headline. This is called vapourware tactics. ⬆

"The purpose of announcing early like this is to freeze the market at the OEM and ISV level. In this respect it is JUST like the original Windows announcement...

"One might worry that this will help Sun because we will just have vaporware, that people will stop buying 486 machines, that we will have endorsed RISC but not delivered... So, Scott, do you really think you can fight that avalanche?"

--Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft