{"id":281,"date":"2012-03-21T07:34:53","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T13:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/?p=281"},"modified":"2012-03-22T02:58:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-22T08:58:30","slug":"if-your-own-employees-wont-use-your-own-products","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/if-your-own-employees-wont-use-your-own-products\/","title":{"rendered":"If your own employees won&#8217;t use your own products&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/blog\/microsoft\/microsoft-banning-mac-ipad-purchases-by-its-sales-and-marketing-group\/12221\">All About Microsoft blog<\/a>, a Microsoft group\u00a0<strong>might<\/strong> soon start preventing employees from\u00a0buying Apple products on the companies dime.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Microsoft\u2019s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, &amp; Operations Group (SMSG) may be putting in place a policy to prevent employees from using corporate funds to buy Macs and iPads.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s front-line consumer and business sales, service and support people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Policies like this aren&#8217;t great for several reasons.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Your own employees aren&#8217;t voluntarily using your products, why not? Banning them from using non-company products for company work just masks the issue and doesn&#8217;t give you an answer to the why question and thus doesn&#8217;t give you a chance to improve your offerings.<\/li>\n<li>If employees don&#8217;t like company products enough to use them over a competitors similar products, maybe they aren&#8217;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&#8217;d be chased out of the building with pitch forks before they had time to enter in their login details.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to the All About Microsoft blog, a Microsoft group\u00a0might soon start preventing employees from\u00a0buying Apple products on the companies dime. Microsoft\u2019s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, &amp; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[170,167,158,169,168],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-technology","tag-ban","tag-ipad","tag-mac","tag-microsoft","tag-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowanhanna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}