According to the All About Microsoft blog, a Microsoft group might soon start preventing employees from buying Apple products on the companies dime.
Microsoft’s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group (SMSG) may be putting in place a policy to prevent employees from using corporate funds to buy Macs and iPads.
Based on an alleged internal e-mail passed on to me by one of my contacts, this edict just came down last week. SMSG encompasses 46,000 Microsoft employees worldwide, according to a Microsoft Careers page about the group, and includes Microsoft’s front-line consumer and business sales, service and support people.
Policies like this aren’t great for several reasons.
- Your own employees aren’t voluntarily using your products, why not? Banning them from using non-company products for company work just masks the issue and doesn’t give you an answer to the why question and thus doesn’t give you a chance to improve your offerings.
- If employees don’t like company products enough to use them over a competitors similar products, maybe they aren’t the best people to have working in your sales and marketing departments. Can you imagine an Apple employee using a ThinkPad with Windows 7 installed over a Macbook Pro with OS X Lion because they thought it was better? No, me neither. They’d be chased out of the building with pitch forks before they had time to enter in their login details.
- It is bad for internal morale and makes you look like a loser to the outside world. Companies that effectively have to ban employees from using a competitors products are doing something wrong.