Quite a few Apple sites were running a story this morning noting that Microsoft's Sales, Marketing and Services Group (AKA SMSG) had allegedly sent out a memo forbidding employees from spending company funds to purchase iPads and Macs. The memo, supposedly from SMSG CFO Alain Crozier, was sent to 46,000 SMSG employees worldwide and was quoted at length in a ZDNet post. Here's a sample of the content: Within SMSG we are putting in place a new policy that says that Apple products (Mac & iPad) should not be purchased with company funds. In the US we will be turning off the Apple products from the Zones Catalog next week, which is the standard purchasing mechanism for these products. Outside of the US - we will work with your finance and procurement teams to send the right message and put the right processes in place. "Sending the right message" appears to be a euphemism for "telling you not to buy Apple products." TUAW reached out to Microsoft for confirmation or denial of the Apple ban, and after several hours we received a terse "No comment" from a Microsoft spokesperson. The ban makes sense -- Microsoft is traditionally an "eat our own dog food" firm, asking employees to use equipment and software that is produced by the company. But then again, Microsofties could learn something about UI and hardware design by using products created by a competitor that is now trashing them in terms of sales in the mobile devices space.Microsoft on iPad and Mac ban: No comment originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Microsoft Spokesperson-Apple Products-Company Funds-Employees
Sunday, 18 March 2012
Restaurant Customers-Apple Products-Food And Drink-Environments-Servers
We've posted before about Hubworks, a company based in Idaho that develops consumer-facing solutions for ordering food and interacting with servers at restaurants via iPads. Most of Apple's sales are directly to consumers, but Hubworks is just one company of many that's getting more involved in business-to-business sales of Apple products. These companies are the main reason you're soon going to see iPads used in kiosks and sales environments all over the world. Hubworks' VP of sales and marketing, Aaron Gabriel, told me, "In the next six months this is something that people will be able to go and see in their local environments." Currently, Hubworks is working on big deals with a few big "large international chains" of restaurants, with pilot programs and trials currently underway to check out how viable these iPad solutions can be. But Gabriel is convinced the iPad has a place in the retail and food sales environments. Hubworks uses its own special case for the iPad. The unit hooks up to Apple's tablet through the dock connector. It contains a credit card slider unit to charge customers and plugs into a point of sale system already working at the restaurants to deliver food and drink orders back to the kitchen. Hubworks has developed its own app to do that, though the iPad can have other apps or games running on it as well. The unit also has a battery pack that allows the iPad to be used for up to 18 hours. While the company hasn't squared away a security solution yet, Gabriel says, "we haven't had any problems thus far." Eventually there will probably be sensors on the iPads to let restaurant management know if they've been carried out the door by less-than-honest customers. Why haven't we seen this solution implemented on a wide scale yet? Gabriel says most of the biggest restaurant chains "just want to see it develop a bit" first and would like to "gather some performance metrics" before widespread deployment. In other words, restaurants are interested in giving iPads to customers, but don't want to be the first to do so. Gabriel is convinced that once these chains see a successful program in action, they'll all jump in on the idea. "These first deals are very important," he says. Once we do see these iPads in stores, Gabriel says there are more benefits than just the customers getting to play with Apple's tablets. Some servers were worried that with customers ordering from the iPad their tips would go down, but Gabriel says, "the average check size is going up" at restaurants where the customers use iPads to order their food and drink. With service that's quicker and ordering that's easier than ever, servers have more time to talk and customers buy more food than usual. That's the kind of stat that could really kick these programs into more widespread use. It may be only a matter of time before you're given a menu at your local chain restaurant printed on an iPad.Hubworks uses iPads to help restaurant customers order food originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 15 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Friday, 24 February 2012
Apple Products-Abc Nightline-Foxconn
Update: You can now watch this full episode on ABC.com. (US only, of course) I just finished watching the ABC Nightline report cleverly named iFactory: Inside Apple. ABC's Bill Weir was given unprecedented access to Foxconn, where iPhones, iPads and Macs are assembled. If you've been following this saga for a while, there wasn't that much new here. It was good to see ABC provide some context as to why people go to work at Foxconn, and the report provided some background on working conditions at the plant. Weir starts off touching upon the Apple mythos, then goes straight into how our iDevices are made. For example, it takes 141 steps to make an iPhone. Something that surprised him: Apple products are largely made by hand. Weir points to a tiny iPad camera module, noting that with two 12-hour shifts each day Foxconn can crank out 300,000 of those in a day. According to ABC it takes 5 days and over 300 hands to assemble an iPad, but they aren't made by robots, they are made by people. Mostly young people. "No one looked over 30," observed Weir. In fact, Weir was there on a day when thousands of young people lined up to apply for work at Foxconn. What was remarkable was that the only requirement seemed to be a valid national ID card. But, as Weir points out again and again, the demand for Apple products is so high that Foxconn can't keep up. They hire en masse and train people for days before putting them to work. Workers at Foxconn tend to be quite young, around 18, and they will often come from impoverished rural areas for the work. This actually has a positive benefit to the people left behind in the villages who told ABC that they felt life was better without the young people around. "More of everything," noted one villager. I have to imagine the generation gap was at play here somewhat, as family ties would still find some people missing their grandkids. But the opportunity at Foxconn is what causes workers to flock to the factories. As for working conditions, I saw very little that was shocking. The only exception was the nets, placed around dorms and other buildings with high floors, which are designed to make potential suicide victims think twice before jumping. Those you don't see many places. Of course, the suicides at Foxconn are partly what drew so much attention to the factory. Louis Woo, a Foxconn executive, explained how Tim Cook flew to China to help organize counseling for people to prevent further suicides. Otherwise, the Foxconn areas shown in the report looked far nicer than any American factory I've been in (and I've been in a few). People complained about a lot of the same stuff you find anywhere -- pay, food, hours. But then, workers do work a 12 hour shift. And they stay in dorms with seven other people in a room that makes my college dorm look grandiose by comparison. Still, this isn't unusual in a country with the single largest population on the planet by far. Weir did show footage of workers napping at their stations, saying that if one ate their meal fast enough, they could catch a quick nap. Foxconn workers have two one-hour breaks to eat, but the executive who led Weir around the factory explained the naps after meals are, in fact, a Chinese tradition. Foxconn offers workers what looked like a very pleasant Internet cafe, recreational facilities (a soccer field was shown) and some education, like English classes. ABC gave no percentages on how many workers use these amenities, but it was pointed out that most people are there to simply work. Then there were the inspections by the Fair Labor Association. The head of that organization explained that he expected Foxconn to put on a show, but that they will conduct "bottom up" interviews to ensure working conditions are decent. I won't spoil the rest, but ABC fairly points out that several other companies contract Foxconn, and Apple takes heat because they are so visible. While the report didn't have any huge revelations (they were denied an interview read more..