Vista to Create 50,000 Jobs in Europe 270
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.'"
Re:This is great (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broke
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.
Mod Parent Up Informative (Score:4, Informative)
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:Mod Parent Up Informative (Score:3, Informative)