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Vista to Create 50,000 Jobs in Europe
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Sep 15, 2006 06:38 AM
from the working-for-the-man dept.
from the working-for-the-man dept.
prostoalex writes "A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to European economy, as it 'will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there,' News.com reports. Europe will see a total of 1.2 mln paychecks thanks to the new operating system: 'In the six countries studied, more than 150,000 IT companies will produce, sell or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista in 2007 and will employ 400,000 people, IDC said. Another 650,000 will be employed in the IT departments of businesses that rely on Vista.'"
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Well, in that case (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well, in that case (Score:4, Interesting)
No, no ... you've got it wrong. Its a feature, not a bug. Since every day will have to be "patch Tuesday", IT departments will be able to better integrate patching into their routine ... by hiring staff dedicated to it.
Actually, the nubmers from the article are total bullshit. Those 650,000 staff would be employed whether the business used Vista or not.
This is great (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is great (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broke
Mod Parent Up Informative (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is great (Score:5, Insightful)
You are so wrong. You just need to be asked to run small company with all bureaucracy done on paper with typewriter. Absolutely w/o computers. You would understand why the boom happened really: computer market stabilized, became commodity and business at large went from paper-based work flow to computer-based one. In fact, computers now allow small companies to increase business volumes: only because bureaucracy is magnitude cheaper now. Many small/private businesses were often running into NOT limit of productivity - but inability to book all orders properly. Now they can. Computers made that easy.
Though I hardly expect the average underage offsprings of computer era - which are made majority of /. readers /posters - to really understand what really computer and data networks did for small/middle/big companies. We already take all the goods for granted.
Just to give one example, especially important to USA with its large populace of public companies. Before computers came, public companies were really run by few people close to board of directors who have had slight majority of shares. For most of little/private investors it didn't made much of a reason to fly across continent just to participate in meeting/voting regarding some current maters. Now, with advent of computers networks, anyone with no matter how small share of company, can participate in voting - remotely & cheaply. That meant to the public companies whole a lot. Exec officers are now under more scrutiny, since large number of small investors really play role: sum of their votes often is large enough to influence decision making. The sum, to calculate before computers came, was impossible.
That's a Fairy Tail with M$. (Score:4, Informative)
You just need to be asked to run small company with all bureaucracy done on paper with typewriter. Absolutely w/o computers. You would understand why the boom happened really: computer market stabilized, became commodity and business at large went from paper-based work flow to computer-based one. In fact, computers now allow small companies to increase business volumes: only because bureaucracy is magnitude cheaper now.
Are you trying to tell me that the average M$ shop is paperless? Hold on a second. ... OK, now I'm back from laughing and crying. Large companies have some rudiments of paper replacement. Small companies have simply been throwing their records away or still have paper files. The M$ monopoly has cost us all lots and lots of money.
At fortune 500 companies, pdf and tiff may indeed have replaced paper records, but M$ had nothing to do with it and the actual work is still done one paper. If the company is highly regulated, like a nuclear power plant, they might have called in IBM to make a document serving and saving system and that has marginally decreased total costs. IT costs, as a portion of the total budget did not change at all! Employees loath and distrust their M$ workstations to the point that they carry their actual work on floppies or USB fobs. The M$ "file servers" are even worse about keeping data. All of the work in progress is printed out and done with pen and paper. The results are laboriously typeset with M$ Word. This is not the office of the future.
Small businesses have it even worse. In one way they have an advantage, a lack of legacy systems to draw them down. The problem is that they do not trust the local IT people they can afford to move them into the future with free Unix derivatives. They could do it all with free software but M$ spends billions of dollars a year in FUD to keep them from doing that.
I'm old enough to have seen it all happen and am bitterly disappointed by the slow pace of change. Family members helped computerize medical records at a large regional hospital back in the 70s. They hooked up a terminal in his house back in the day Ma Bell rented people their phones. My first "real" computer was an IBM clone. I hooked a typewriter to it and used it to print my papers, mail and CAD in the 80s. That is the model still used by most companies. 25 years later all correspondence, records keeping, even scratch work, should be electronic but it's not.
The overriding problems for large and small businesses using M$ are poor GUI and poor reliability issues. A lack of virtual desktops forces printing of all real work in progress. If you can't spread it out on your computer, you have to spread it out on your desk. M$'s notorious lack of stability and "complex" file formats rules out their use for real records keeping. Even if the business is bright enough to waste money on Acrobat distiller, so that formatting issues go away, the underlying OS and file system lacks reliability. As noted, only large companies have spent the big bucks on document archive systems people believe in. I've written elsewhere about the way the combination of poor GUI and reliability ruins place keeping and wastes employee time on reboots every day. All of these issues are solved in free software.
The cost of all of this intentional waste may indeed produce hundreds of thousands of jobs. How else would Bill Gates have all his billions? The problem is that every penny spent is waste and we would all be better off if those people were making things that people want and need instead of endlessly running circles around broken equipment which has failed to deliver on it's promise for decades.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I just had an epiphany.
Twitter is astroturfing.
Not intentionally, mind you. He wouldn't take Microsoft's filthy lucre, nor do I think he's trying reverse psychology to promote them. But every time he posts something like this, his good intentions ju
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You would also then note that M$ doesn't really play important role in OS business per se. M$ really doesn't understand where from its fortune came from.
M$ was earning money making early very different PCs behaving similarly. Or in other words, all tho
That's like saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's like saying hurricane Katrina was a boon to the New Orleans economy, as it instantly created thousands of search & rescue, demolition, rebuilding and emergency management jobs.
You can spin anything any way you like.
Re:That's like saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
that's economics for you (Score:5, Informative)
The reason for such silly conclusions is that large, unquantifiable costs are ignored. In the case of Vista, it will probably create lots of jobs (because it will be a lot of work to install and maintain), but those jobs will not be productive jobs--they don't contribute to what the companies using Vista actually are supposed to do.
In different words, a company producing widgets will still be producing widgets pretty much the same way after Vista has been installed, they'll just have sunk a boatload of money into migrating, retraining, licensing, and hardware upgrades. Furthermore, the computer specialists doing all that work are kept from doing something actually productive. As a result, the cost of widgets has gone up and the economy is worse off overall.
Re:that's economics for you (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you've confused marketeers with economists. Economists (at least the smart ones) ask a fundemnetal question:
This activity occurs at the expense of what?
Evert transaction occurs at the expense of another - if I buy a sweater then I don't buy a TV. You can't just look at any one action but need to look at the impact of that action.
Politicians and marketeers trumpet job creation - those pork barrel projects - they create jobs and pump taxes back into the economy (which I will use to buy more votes) - forget what the original taxpayer might have done with the nmoney had we not taken it in taxes; spent some percent running the government (a deadweight load of sorts) and actually put less back in then we took out.
If Vista makes companies more productive then they can create more jobs - if not then teh net effect is zero (or less because of switching costs)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was going to take it a step further: shouldn't the more productive companies be able to cut jobs because they can produce the same output with fewer people? (Yeah, ok, I know thi
Re:That's like saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
On the downside ... (Score:5, Funny)
Due to the cessation of Windows XP, hordes of people employed to manage, fix and repair systems based around Windows XP will lose their jobs.
Luckily they are mostly expected to get jobs managing, fixing and repairing Windows Vista systems.
Thats it? (Score:5, Funny)
Yup, that's it. (Score:3, Insightful)
in other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
But how does announcing this help their business? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista is so complex that it's going to be a nightmare to try to get a handle on it. These new jobs are glaziers making glass for windows broken by boys throwing rocks. False industry, and a burden on resources. These people could be doing something productive but instead they'll be put to work holding Vista together.
Obviously bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Same goes for those that "will be employed in the IT departments of businesses that rely on Vista." Because previously they were using XP.
Vista brings nothing to Europe, but this is just about the EU actually making a stand against Microsoft's illegal actions.
Re:Obviously bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
There is a shortage already (Score:2)
Oh wait...
Broken window falacy of economic activity (Score:5, Insightful)
Now while I could probably be convinced that Windows Vista has _some_ productivity benefits over current systems I doubt it's really that large. In many cases the net contribution of these 650k people is going to be in fact negative as their disruption and need to prove their own continued usefullness actually decreases productivity of society as a whole - fixing things that aren't broken for example.
Re: (Score:2)
EU (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You assume wrong.
The Media Player thing didn't result in Microsoft being forced to flog XP without Media Player in the EU. However, they are obliged t
Sure it will. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sure it will. (Score:5, Funny)
Decline? (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand ... (Score:4, Insightful)
If I were an IT decision-maker in Europe I might read this differently. Hmmm, 50,000 jobs is a lot of Euros. What exactly are we getting for that huge expenditure? Maybe we should think a little more carefully about doing this upgrade and consider the alternatives.
Re: (Score:2)
What "unique" capabilities would that be?
Of course... (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Gibson was right (Score:5, Interesting)
sPh
[1] The old SpinRite guy who wrote a lot of good utilities in the DOS era.
Solution? (Score:2, Funny)
They probably could fix overpopulation too if they'd ship cyanide capsules with the installation media.
How is that good? (Score:2)
=="Vista to cost European companies $3bn/year" (Score:2, Interesting)
TCO? (Score:2)
Sounds like one more piece of ammo for Linux, the BSDs, or even Apple.
Too bad... (Score:3, Funny)
How many more jobs would be created if ... (Score:5, Funny)
If this is how one creates jobs, one can create even more jobs if Europe switches to CP/M or IBM 370/155 or Cyber 170 NOS.
So basically it's an economic disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista will cost 2.5 Billion dollars? (Score:4, Insightful)
How is spending an additional 2.5 Billion Euro a good thing?
Or did they do this to draw away from the 5 Billion (100k new jobs) later in the article.
That 5 Billion is money that can't be spent on other things, is it really a good idea to flaunt how much vista is going to cost us?
50.000 jobs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like an army of IT workers supposed to assist Europe's migration to GNU/Linux...
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you. I thought all this modernization and automation stuff was supposed to REDUCE a company's investment in la