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my company switched from Groupwise to Gmail/Google Docs and it has been embarrassingly good and well behaved
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# ? May 7, 2015 16:25 |
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# ? Jun 11, 2024 13:45 |
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MrMoo posted:Is he the one developing PowerShell for Linux? finally with PowerShell for Linux you can have the command line experience of Windows .. on Linux! and with Windows 10 you can have the desktop UI experience of Linux ... on Windows!
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# ? May 7, 2015 16:27 |
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Mr. Nice! posted:i have to add classes to a shopping cart when the only tool you have is a hammer...
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# ? May 7, 2015 16:50 |
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BangersInMyKnickers posted:we just stumbled in to a really loving stupid bug that has apparently been breaking VSS for our exchange backups lmfao
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# ? May 7, 2015 18:03 |
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so i used to work in a call center that contracted directly with MS for outbound calling services. we mainly called people in the MS partner program to offer them deals and stuff, or tell them that their membership was about to lapse and they'd lose access to all of their software that they'd get as a certified partner. I got laid off at the height of the gfc in 2009 but i saw and heard a lot of MS's dumb decisions. the company is defunct because their practices of firing people indiscriminately eventually caught up to them but i'd be happy to share some stories if ya'all are interested
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:28 |
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seiferguy posted:so i used to work in a call center that contracted directly with MS for outbound calling services. we mainly called people in the MS partner program to offer them deals and stuff, or tell them that their membership was about to lapse and they'd lose access to all of their software that they'd get as a certified partner. I got laid off at the height of the gfc in 2009 but i saw and heard a lot of MS's dumb decisions. the company is defunct because their practices of firing people indiscriminately eventually caught up to them but i'd be happy to share some stories if ya'all are interested seifer tell the stories
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:29 |
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Captain Foo posted:seifer tell the stories
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:30 |
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Captain Foo posted:seifer tell the stories
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:44 |
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shopping cart is a dumb metaphor that gets crowbarred into the most inexplicable places in enterprise shitware
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:46 |
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Mr Dog posted:shopping cart is a dumb metaphor that gets crowbarred into the most inexplicable places in enterprise shitware the HR job / hiring careers website for my company has a Job Cart where you add a position into a shopping cart and check out with submitting your resume
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:48 |
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alright, I'll tell one at a time or as i remember them, bear in mind this is circa 2008: my favorite had to be related to the microsoft action pack subscription. if you aren't familiar with it, it's a software subscription for ms partners that are small businesses to basically run their company. The amount of software for the price is insane, for like $500 a year you got a copy of server 2008, 10 copies of vista ultimate and of office 2007 among other things. it was basically offered to be for companies that were re-selling microsoft products in some way to run their business (like oem system builders, or software vendors that created software with an ms background). well, the issue was that a lot of non-tech companies were taking advantage of them like doctor's offices, floral shops, etc. and ms hated that. so what they decided was that you had to take one of those tests in the partner portal that basically proved you weren't a complete brain-dead moron. they hired our company to call all current action pack subscribers to tell them of this new requirement. it was pretty great when a record comes up and it's blatantly a doctor's office and yet you had to treat them all as if they were legit partners to microsoft. the thing was is that the tests were super easy, and even if you failed, you could retake it again until you passed. you literally could do it in 15 minutes however, despite us calling literally every ms partner with an action pack, the partners were still too dumb to figure out how to take the test (the unintuitiveness of the ms portal didn't help either), so when renewal time came around, no one was able to do it, and microsoft started losing mad money on lack of renewal subscriptions so they ended up scrapping the requirement anyways my favorite was my coworker called a guy telling him of the requirement, and then he went into full rant "i don't have any GODDAMN time in my day to take a test. i'm out here making a living with no free time, and microsoft expects me to take some test?" and he ranted at her for about half an hour. toward the end, she calmly said "sir, you do realize in the half hour that you've taken out of your day to talk to me, you could have taken and passed the test twice?" and then he got all somber and said "i'm sorry. you're right. i'll hang up now" so lol i did a lot of event recruitment for launch events, like server 2008, whatever the new version of dynamics was, and i think even did a little bit of office 2007. the best was that ms created two events for a dynamics launch, one for the regular IT guys, and another called the "executive series" in which they wanted to invite only the ceo's / presidents of companies to show them how great their software would be for them. it was literally impossible to 1) get a ceo on the phone, and 2) convince them that a dumb launch event was worth their time. everything about dynamics is bad, all the way up to the marketing I'll write some more stories as I remember them
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:50 |
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there was a cool new trashcan mac sitting on my desk when i came to work this week. also a new Intuos thats all touch and poo poo so its like a big trashcan ipad. it is baller as heck and i am going to build a lil waterwheel dealy i can put on the top so the waste heat will make it spin a bit. it will be fun. i will make it look like the loading pinwheel. u like this. also when u move the trashcan mac the lights on the back turn on since it knows ur fuckin with it. v. cool and winders should make a trashcan Surface
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:54 |
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please do write more stories.
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:56 |
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seiferguy posted:
liar.
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:58 |
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32MB OF ESRAM posted:winders should make a trashcan Surface But all Surfaces end up in a trashcan eventually.
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# ? May 7, 2015 19:59 |
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univbee posted:But all Surfaces end up in a trashcan eventually. ashes to ashes
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# ? May 7, 2015 20:15 |
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butt to butt
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# ? May 7, 2015 20:23 |
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man i just stepped back a bit and thought about the surface story again ms insists that windows 8 isn't bad, it's their partners that aren't designing good hardware ms designs "good hardware" ms loses a billion dollars on it ms admits windows 8 is bad jesus christ.
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# ? May 7, 2015 20:25 |
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the surface was being worked on before windows 8 was released
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# ? May 7, 2015 20:28 |
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32MB OF ESRAM posted:liar. We made like 200 calls a day, so you had some more memorable calls than others
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# ? May 7, 2015 20:35 |
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Mr. Nice! posted:please do write more stories.
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:04 |
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Serious question why does ms do what it does. Why make a tablet or phone when they are bad at it. Why buy other companies when they are just gonna overpay and kill the institutional knowledge wouldn't it be best to just sell desk top os and enterprise support. Rather than spend billion on mine craft billions for Nokia billions for surface.
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:10 |
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max4me posted:Serious question why does ms do what it does. Why make a tablet or phone when they are bad at it. Why buy other companies when they are just gonna overpay and kill the institutional knowledge wouldn't it be best to just sell desk top os and enterprise support. Rather than spend billion on mine craft billions for Nokia billions for surface. executive bonuses
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:13 |
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seiferguy posted:my favorite had to be related to the microsoft action pack subscription. it's always fun when the business in question grows too big for the 10-user limit to suffice and then realize just how far out the rear end they have to pay to redo everything "right"
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:14 |
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max4me posted:Serious question why does ms do what it does. Why make a tablet or phone when they are bad at it. Apple's success broke their brain. If they can make tons of money on hardware why not us?
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:15 |
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max4me posted:Serious question why does ms do what it does. Why make a tablet or phone when they are bad at it. Why buy other companies when they are just gonna overpay and kill the institutional knowledge wouldn't it be best to just sell desk top os and enterprise support. Rather than spend billion on mine craft billions for Nokia billions for surface. basically not dabbling in every hot new thing is pretty much the one way the ceo can be fired (because his one job is "do everything in your power to make shareholders money") and things are weird where your job is way more secure if you at least attempt and fail spectacularly than if you "play it safe".
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:16 |
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ms is just afraid to be a boring massively profitable company, it makes your stock less interesting compared to a "growth" firm, it makes you less attractive for hiring, etc. bing, the xbox, surface and winpho were purely defensive moves and the xbox is arguably the most successful and still hasn't even swung a second-place finish
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:18 |
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A quick story here: my first call center project was to call up all the microsoft partner OEM system builders because of a new promotion microsoft was running for them. it was essentially that there was a website they could go to and print out some customizable fliers to put in their store, then I think there was a software bundle as well, and then let them know there was a Microsoft / AMD roadshow coming to their area and if they were interested in going. most of the people i talked to on the phone were like "yeah this sounds interesting" though most of them told me they weren't interested in the roadshow because they'd never build systems with AMDs because all more or less had bad experiences with the thunderbird or something anyway we wrapped up that project, then 3 months later the same client called us up and said they wanted to get feedback from that assignment. so we called literally everyone again, and i didn't hear from one single person who said they took advantage of that stupid flier offer. so microsoft 1) set up a dumb advertisement that no one took advantage of, 2) paid a company to promote a terrible offering, and 3) paid said company again to see how it went. I mean we didn't care, it was all billable hours to us internally, our company had a wiki for sharing info. some of our, uh, "less than professional" call center agents took it to themselves to create a "funny names list" which encouraged all agents to list funny names of people they've called. the only one i contributed was that i called a company called "macrosoft" once, which i don't know how that company hasn't gotten sued yet. the best was that one time someone listed "king wang" and someone literally replied to that "LMAO that's so funny because asian people have small penises." Bear in mind the wiki sent out an e-mail notice to everyone in the company daily that showed pages that were recently edited and it would show what the edits were. So everyone (including our CEO) got an e-mail that had the reference to a small asian dong in it. we were all king wang that day i once called a guy saying we were from microsoft and he said he didn't want to talk to me because microsoft was suing him. poor guy
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:41 |
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seiferguy posted:We made like 200 calls a day, so you had some more memorable calls than others but they can't all be your favourite!!!!!!!!
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:43 |
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32MB OF ESRAM posted:but they can't all be your favourite!!!!!!!! one was a favorite call, the other was a favorite project
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# ? May 7, 2015 21:46 |
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BangersInMyKnickers posted:we just stumbled in to a really loving stupid bug that has apparently been breaking VSS for our exchange backups why are you using visual sourcesafe in 2015
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# ? May 7, 2015 22:01 |
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univbee posted:basically not dabbling in every hot new thing is pretty much the one way the ceo can be fired (because his one job is "do everything in your power to make shareholders money") and things are weird where your job is way more secure if you at least attempt and fail spectacularly than if you "play it safe". this plus not recognizing or willing to admit that the wild success of windows and office is due as much to being in the right place at the right time as it was to any special advantage microsoft has. they keep trying to recreate that environment
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# ? May 7, 2015 22:07 |
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univbee posted:it's always fun when the business in question grows too big for the 10-user limit to suffice and then realize just how far out the rear end they have to pay to redo everything "right" lol this is exactly our problem now
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# ? May 7, 2015 22:26 |
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gargle chome posted:lol this is exactly our problem now I'm pretty sure it's changed but back in the day it was super easy to game the system and get upgraded to a certified partner. Just get 1 person to get an MCP then get references. you can fake those easily
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# ? May 7, 2015 22:45 |
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carry on then posted:this plus not recognizing or willing to admit that the wild success of windows and office is due as much to being in the right place at the right time as it was to any special advantage microsoft has. they keep trying to recreate that environment I remember years ago on this board someone pointed out that apple was a nitch high margin brand for consumer electronics. You could argue this started with the ipod. Basically apple became sony. That is a totally different game than what MS plays but ms could most likely play if they didn't keep playing cross brands of everything. Have a few game studios crank out games for pc only. Have MSN be a yahoo like portal. Google passed everyone off with killing reader. gently caress have bing be the best reader you can have. Hell Google is so ADD about poo poo exploit it. Finally after a year of reading the ms sucks threads here the common thread is that their very culture is anathema to what they want. Purge middle management kill stack ranking. Listen to what customers want and make a good product
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# ? May 8, 2015 00:51 |
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max4me posted:Google passed everyone off with killing reader. you mean 10 people. also youre retarded
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# ? May 8, 2015 00:55 |
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pram posted:you mean 10 people. also youre retarded If I m retarded then how am I posting from a blackberry instead of an iPhone
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# ? May 8, 2015 01:02 |
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max4me posted:If I m retarded then how am I posting from a blackberry instead of an iPhone Lol.
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# ? May 8, 2015 01:18 |
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tools not toys
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# ? May 8, 2015 01:19 |
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# ? Jun 11, 2024 13:45 |
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seiferguy posted:however, despite us calling literally every ms partner with an action pack, the partners were still too dumb to figure out how to take the test (the unintuitiveness of the ms portal didn't help either), so when renewal time came around, no one was able to do it, and microsoft started losing mad money on lack of renewal subscriptions so they ended up scrapping the requirement anyways ms in a nutshell
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# ? May 8, 2015 01:28 |