Please hold on while I edit Wikipedia and bribe some OSHA government officials to fix those issues for you...

You know how the Premier likes surprises. He planned to announce it at the next party meeting.

In Microsoft's case, they'd probably hash it up with Powershell, Hyper-V and the System Center Suite, as they're all products that are in-house. RDP still will be the prevailing tool of the day, though.

The 100k salaries were the reasons they've outsourced the mainframe jobs to Argentina/Brazil. They've also restructured their service delivery. They're doing what they can to control OT, but there's never enough people. They're trying to take a shot at pooling the overworked people in effort to try to get even more productivity out of them... it's rather crazy. And yeah... the top employees still get worked hard. We've got some people that were suppose to be mid to high-grade in classification... which don't even know the products or the specific functions of the products they're dealing with. I've heard the call-center half is dismal as well, from a friend. IBM needs a union for it's FTEs and contractors. It's well-earned. The contracting companies they've restricted to don't pay benefits (if they do, it's unsubsidized), and low-ball you. The budgets are dramatically slashed. Everything for a dime if they can help it. And they still want ~2000 employees across the board for the endeavor.

I can't say the days of having the 100 day break and coming back to Microsoft are still here. I've been one of those a- employees and entered my break knowing my job wasn't going to be there due to a re-org. One of my friends there at the time that went on break earlier wasn't remotely lucky about knowing that her job was going to disappear. Saying that the 100 day break at MS is a paid vacation is based on the assumption that there will be a job for you at the end of it is a bit untrue. One gets just as stressed out and still has to hunt for a jo likely before.

John Titor? Is that that you?