There's a difference between "Not knowing the competitor's products and why yours is (hopefully) better" and "Not using the product for your personal use". Likewise, testing for features and functionality, making sure it doesn't crash, making sure all promises are fulfilled -- all of those, to my mind, fall into "QA" and not "using the app". Perhaps I'm over-interpreting, but when I think of "using an app", I am thinking "I would use this app if I wasn't working for the company; if I saw it in the store, I would buy it." There's a lot of reasons for employees of a company to have no personal, out-of-work, interest in an application without the application being poorly designed, broken, etc.

I learned an awful lot about employment agencies when I worked on a product designed for that business. I spent a lot of time talking to potential users, having them test the software, tell me what it did wrong, what features they needed, etc.

However, I didn't run home and fire it up for my own use... because I don't run an employment agency. I couldn't view the product as a user of it.

Further, depending on the size of the company and the division of labor, many employees may have little need to know about the functionality of the final product in order to do their job and do it well. To use a non-programming example, an artist hired to paint an image for a new "Magic" card does not need to know the card's mechanical function or even how to play the game; he needs to know the art style, similar images, and any important themes or iconic imagery to use. Etc. (On the flip side, someone who designs the card's mechanics had better be an active player of the game. There's a lot of grey areas and caveats here, something the Internet, in general, despises; all arguments must be in absolutes, and any exception voids the entire thing.)

Now, of course, since the OP won't tell us the product or the company, I don't know if any of this applies. If the app *is* in a category most of them would use (or use competing apps for, already), and they STILL don't use it... then, yeah, there's a real problem with the app itself. I just don't like to make assumptions.

I see a lot of "If the employees don't use it, it must be crap!" comments here, which makes me wonder a little about what kinds of jobs people hold. Most of my professional career has been spent writing code for products I would never personally use -- vertical market software for large financial institutions, for example, or custom databases for people with very specific needs. To pick something at random, an app which helps people layout and plan gardens is not necessarily an app most of the programmers who work on it will be using themselves, unless you happened to have hired only programmers who are also gardeners. Replace "gardening" with "birdwatching", "tracking blood sugar levels", "scanning postage stamps for your online stamp collection", or a zillion other things which there might be a market for, but which might not be a passion for the people actually developing it. It's really not at all uncommon for the employees of a company to not also be the target market of that company, and not just in software.

Well, I'd say, do this:
Is the app actually any good? Does it do what it's supposed to? Does it have a target audience that would like it, but might not be aware of it?
If so, promote it honestly. Tell the truth:"I work for this company, and I'm proud of the product we make. If you want an app that does blah, you should try this one out. It's nifty, and I stand behind the work my company and my co-workers have done on it."

If not... just look for a new job. If you think your company is making crap, you're probably right, and it's better to get out before they kick you out.

I'm less certain than you, because this presumes that "enemy" craft would be large enough to be easily detected amidst all the myriad space junk in orbit. I'm going on the assumption "future war" would be mostly small unmanned craft sniping each other, not Star Destroyers lumbering around. Of course, anything big enough to drop rocks would probably also be big enough to detect and fry. (Also, how trivial is it to hit something in orbit with a ground based laser, when said something may be moving very fast, tossing out chaff, or otherwise not just sitting there waiting to get blasted? Given Sufficiently Advanced(tm) technology, you can pack a lot of destructive power in something the size of a grapefruit, and if it's detected less than a second from its target, accompanied by a thousand other grapefruits, your ability to lock on, predict its motion, and fire is severely limited.)

I mean, let's face it -- no one's produced a fully reliable laser-based defense against good ol' missiles. I'm not sanguine you can build a ground-based laser defense against the kind of tiny semi-independent craft we'll be able to use in orbit.

Ultimately, I see orbital war as constant clouds of millions of small, highly mobile, vehicles constantly trying to decide which other vehicles are "the enemy" and blow them up, with evolving algorithms that try to trump the other guy's prediction/evasion/detection schemes. Given sufficiently advanced (tm) technology, the vehicles could easily modify their own hardware, cannibalizing enemy "corpses" or each others for raw materials.

I believe it will end up being a lot like that described in Niven's "Protector"... you launch your weapons, and, five years later, you look to see if they hit.

That's for interstellar combat. For orbital combat... a lot would depend on the goal. Are you trying to knock out the enemy's satellites? Drop bombs on his population centers? Stop his transport ships from leaving Earth and getting to their destinations?

The easy answer is "drones, drones, and more drones", but this assumes ECCM will equal ECM well enough to make it at least a tossup that you'll get through the other guy's defenses. I'd also make a guess that we'll never get as much damage potential out of a beam weapon as we will out of an explosive, and the simpler the technology, the less things can go wrong. I'm seeing, basically, drones that get as far as they can from the enemy, analyze their motions, and then launch direct-fire weapons based on prediction algorithms as to where the enemy will be when the projectiles get there. I'd also speculate that anything launched, including the drones, would be absolutely blind to any kind of orders to go home, change targets, respond to IFF, etc, because the chances of being fed false data are too great. This would lead, of course, to the launch of basically uncontrolled weapons armed with considerable destructive power, so, if they were hacked pre-launch... oops...

This, in turn, might lead to remote control, where the drones have no "brains" but are piloted by humans. Of course, this opens the same problem -- if the drones are controlled in any way by an outside signal, an enemy can and will find a way to hijack that signal. So, back to self-guided vehicles with no way to turn them off or shut them down. (And even this leads to problems... if there's a "mission complete, go home" algorithm, you run the risk of someone figuring out what the drone needs to "see" to conclude "mission complete" and finding a way to fake it. So, logically, you just have the drone explode when it's done.

If the general area being fought over is well defined, you might have some kind of minefield, using virtually-inert devices that rely on passive sensors to come to life and go 'boom' when something is near, but I've read a lot of people arguing that nothing is inert enough to not be trivially detected far off.

(Of course, I'm not sure there's anything to fight over in space other than to knock out the other guy's satellites, and there won't be anything else up there for a long, long time... so long that making predictions about the kind of tech used is probably impossible. As for the satellites, it's probably much easier to just fire some ground-based or plane-based missiles at them than to try for any kind of "space war".)

Limits in power are not limits in vileness.

People who exploit ignorance are, pretty much, the sort of people who are most unfit to wield power and the most likely to seek it. It is, simply, the principle of the thing -- what we have here is an opportunistic villain who sees an easy target and a way to paint himself as a moralist and a champion of the underdog. Who could be in favor of bullying and obesity, right? And what kind of greedy, selfish, person, would protest such a tiny little tax to do so much good, right?

Being petty in power as well as petty in soul, he can't do much harm currently, but that doesn't make him any less despicable.

...due to a sporting event.

In the United States, sporting events are often associated with violent riots, as well, though with lower death tolls. Europe is well known for its soccer hooligans.

Ever hear of 80 people being killed following a LAN event? Any riots at GenCon or E3?

Didn't think so.

If this guy was sincere, he'd be proposing a 1% tax on sports equipment, sales of licensed sports franchise clothing, etc, and using the money to fund children's hospitals which treat the many crippling (and sometimes fatal) injuries that occur from childhood sports. (Check out the average number of high school students killed in school shootings each year, and the average number of high school students killed in school sports.)

Of course, he's not sincere. "Sincerity" is an alien concept to such as he. He's a vile, contemptible, parasitic piece of verminous scum who exploits fear and ignorance in order to gain power. He is a creature without any personal worth, a loathsome leech who feeds off the misery and pain of others, and grows fat and happy on their suffering. Or, in other words, a politician. Even among that repugnant crew of amoral reprobates, though, people like Fourkiller represent the scrapings of the bottom of a barrel that is, itself, filled with the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel.

Because.... because SCIENCE, that's why! They're tampering in God's domain! There are things man was not meant to know! If it's not 100% safe, it's 100% dangerous, like fire! Fire bad!

Get with the program, will you?

They've been doing this on shows like CSI and NCIS for years. :) You mean... they were just making it up? Wow. My faith in Hollywood's technical advisers is shattered forever.

The handful of people defending this idiocy choose two tactics: "Well, this is a New Global Age" and "Hey, why are you all so close minded? Remember, they laughed at continental drift!" Let's look at those defenses.

The idea that this would help people who travel a lot, or people who do a lot of global business, is bollocks, because it removes all information content from time. Right now, "12:00 PM" conveys meaning -- it means, for most people, "around lunchtime". If it's 12:00 everywhere on Earth at once, that meaning is lost. This proposal MAKES THINGS WORSE. IT REDUCES INFORMATION CONTENT. Human biology will not change; we've evolved to a particular timescale and we're happier, healthier, and more productive when we stick to it -- though of course individuals vary. (And if it turns out that a slightly mutant internal clock leads to you producing more children, over time, the internal clocks of our whole species might change... but just because you make a fortune in currency trading because you're sharpest at 4 AM doesn't imply you'll have more kids, as wealth tends to negatively correlate with offspring in industrial nations, but I digress.)

So, the idea that "If it's 6:00 here, it's 6:00 everywhere!" is somehow useful or helpful for the New Global Era is absolute and utter drivel, because it forces you to remember what's happening at "6:00" in any part of the world. In London, do people eat lunch at 6:00, or leave work, or are they sound asleep? In Hong Kong, is 6:00 breakfast time, the start of the work day, or rush hour? It's very easy for a computer to add/subtract hours automatically, so you can schedule things to your time and other people see it at theirs; it's harder for a computer to deal with abstractions like "It's around lunchish", without having to be programmed with something that ties activity periods to GPS systems. We could have Clippy come up and say, "You're scheduling a meeting with the Hong Kong office for 3:00 PM, which is when they're going to be home with their families. Would you like to reschedule? Y/N"

Remember, folks: The reason we remember the wacky, far-out ideas that everyone laughed at but which turned out to be brilliant is because they're the extreme minority -- we report on planes that crash, not ones that land safely. Most of the wacky, far-out ideas that everyone laughed at.... deserved to be laughed at. Being "outside the box" is not the same as being RIGHT, and most of the time, the box is there because no one's found a USEFUL idea outside of it.