View from inside Ford (Score 1)

I've been a Ford employee (internal software development) for a long time now and here's my take on the free computer thing: Ford is desperate to be seen as beaten the cyclic auto industry. We plan to be profitable even in a downturn. (Well, that's the *plan* anyway... ;)

Part of that is an image thing -- the stupid Wired wired/tired listings aren't true, but somehow people believe them anyway. Jac Nasser (our CEO) sends out weekly messages signed with the motto "customer-focused and shareholder-driven." You may not like him, but nobody can argue he doesn't live up to that motto. Lately he's been pursuing e-business and the Internet, I think in an attempt to break into some of the high-tech stock over-valuation. Ford has been *very* profitable for a long time now; our stock actually pays dividends! That's not reflected in the stock price though and it's been a major dissapointment. (Very depressing to see the Internet companies -- bleeding money -- have such astronomical PE ratios.) The free computer bit is a nice fringe-benefit for employees and a great way to get into the news. Is it going to revolutionize employee/customer and employee/management relations? Maybe.

I'm not sure about the privacy issues myself. The computers are going to be owned by the employees and used by the employees on our own time -- that's very clear. I think any privacy invasion would make Ford look very bad and would certainly open up major lawsuit potential. Anyways, my machine will be running Linux and talking to my regular ISP so I'm not concerned about *my* privacy.

Lastly, the machines Ford is handing out are pretty nice commodity Wintel PCs. (Um, except for the Win part of course... but that's only temporary. ;) The low-end is a 500MHz Celeron with 64MB of memory and a 15" monitor. The high-end is a 733MHz Pentium-III with 256MB of memory, 19" monitor, CD-RW, and DVD. They haven't published the cost for the upgrades.

I'm also not sure how this will affect the nice Dell discounts we also get. It would be kind of neat to see Dell match HP's prices.