I heard that all of the recent Delta/Microsoft decisions were the direct order of Delta's CEO, Richard Anderson. He and Ballmer have been friends for a long time. Both of them have strong ties to Detroit and frequently overlap at events like The National Summit. Look for an article in the April 2012 Sky magazine for some of their candid conversations.
Not true. The majority are Apple fanatics. The Delta team has *excellent* ties to Cupertino and the two companies collaborated heavily to get the FlyDelta app launched (note how frequently it shows up in marketing images when Apple needs to use an icon).
When Delta's technology committee was charged with a new point-of-sale method, they recommended Apple. With the tablet tests winding down, IT recommended keeping the iPads. There's speculation that neither report was read by Richard, as the Delta executive team had already been swayed by the insider deal Microsoft offered.
PS: The flight attendants hate the Lumias too, so it's not just the pilots who are disappointed.
Delta does have an excellent app which is easily the best app in their market.
Quote: "A report by the Wall Street Journal said Delta estimates it will save $13 million in fuel costs by moving to EFBs, so delaying the transition from paper by two years for the Surface 2 could cost the airline $20 million or more, far more than the roughly $5.5 million the tablets would actually cost."
Add in at least another $13 million when the Surface drops off the market and Delta has to spend a year or so retooling for iPads. Time lost to the competition: 3 years.
Of course, $20-30 million is nothing for Microsoft, especially when their public persona is concerned, so I suspect there's a hidden clause in the contract that will allow Delta to recoup at least some of that loss if Microsoft abandons the tablet market. Unfortunately, that'll do nothing for the "our bosses are idiots" loss of morale by flight crews.
Years ago, I knew someone with a company whose salesmen felt they needed full-sized cars to carry all their samples. They were ticked off when a penny-pinching management forced them into compact cars. Their supervisor came up with a response. They would add oil when it got low, but they'd never, never get the oil changed.
I hope Delta is buying a lot of extras, because my hunch is that those Surface 2s are going to suffer from quite a few accidents.
No he's Japanese and trying write in English which he probably does much better than you write in Japanese. Either way we understood the message but unfortunately it seems to fail anyway because outsourcing customer support to India has almost nothing to do with US companies' IT departments trying to keep themselves employed. I doubt the pilots would be calling customer support anyway.
Actually Jjaro is Japanese and the original poster, Maestro64, is from Philadelphia!
This reminds me of a recent TV show that I was watching, "Under the Dome". I saw numerous Windows phones and Surface tablets in that TV series. The way that they were featured was so in your face and so obvious, that it could only have been a paid product placement by Microsoft. It was totally unrealistic to see a product that is a certified flop pop up all over a TV show, but that hardly anybody uses in real life.
Haha, yes I noticed that as well! There are also a fair number of shows that have a large number of Apple products on show, but the difference is that they are always in a realistic setting. They've started using Surface tablets on NCIS: Los Angeles and I always groan when they start "touching and flicking" and the Surface display is clearly superimposed!
unfortunately this is a story repeated daily all over the place. Clueless Microsoft drones forcing garbage Microsoft software on IT departments. The problem is the vast majority of IT people in the corporate world are totally useless idiots who have zero clue.
No surprise here. It's the only way Microsoft can sell their crappy products. They make deals with companies and companies force people to use them. It worked for them before with Windows. Whenever users have a choice, they choose Apple.
Maybe Microsoft could pay corporations to force their employees to search using IE and Bing.
they are starting to do this. Where i work they have the horrible WebSense nonsense which blocks all sorts of things. At least twice a month GOogle will be blocked along with Gmail for a few hours. Then i check BING and MSN/Hotmail//Live Mail/Outlook or whatever it is called this week and they magically work fine.
You know when you go to some remote part of a third world country and you see the whole town wearing t-shirts from 1980's tv shows or bands? Somebody obviously unloaded a warehouse of clothes they couldn't get rid of.
Delta seems pretty confident that the Surface 2 will pass the FAA%u2019s tests... Imagine the irony should the Surface 2 wound up failing those tests. Irk some of your pilots for nothing...
All I can say is when a user in an enterprise gets the BSOD, no body dies, when a pilot gets it on take off or landing, could be disastrous. Surface runs Windows 8 and because it has not been widely adopted by many organizations, it has not been put through its paces like Windows 7. How many Service packs did Win 7 got after launch because of wide adoption? Two. How many SP's did Win 8 got? None until they came out with 8.1. That's why the surface should stay out of mission critical applications, major enterprises know this which is they have not deployed it fully.
Nearly three years ago, Dell announced plans to adopt 25,000 Windows Phone 7 devices the month after Microsoft launched its new WP7 platform.
The move appeared to account for many of the WP7 phones that eventually sold, but didn't benefit Dell's struggling operations or enable either company to make headway into the mobile market.
Why are there two paragraphs about Dell in the middle of this article? Kinda confusing when "Dell" and "Delta" are pretty close, and there's no transitional sentence to explain the digression.
...<snip>...That's why the surface should stay out of mission critical applications, major enterprises know this which is they have not deployed it fully.
Microsoft in general needs to stay out of mission-critical applications. In "The enterprise" (Fu¢king god, how I hate that term! What a bunch of pretentious a$$holes!), it doesn't matter, because nothing that they're doing makes a bit of difference. It didn't make any difference when it was cubicle drones shuffling papers from one pile to another, and it doesn't make any difference now that it's cubicle drones clacking away on keyboards. (I remember when, for a computer to be "suitable for business use", all that was necessary was that it have a green-and-black text-only screen, because unless your every moment on the job was a living hell, you weren't earning your pay.)
However, in anything that matters—anybody remember the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies? Of course, on NBC, we only saw a split second of the BSoD, and they immediately picked up again after an unknown period of time. Like Tex Johnson's barrel roll in the 707 prototype over the 1955 Gold Cup, it may be 30 years before it emerges from the Memory Hole and we get the details. The thing to take away is: this is what happens when Microsoft has a literal army working on something for years! Sorry, anything critical to a plane in flight should have no connection to Microsoft whatsoever!
A couple of things: First, how is choosing Surface over the iPad putting "public safety at risk"? The FCC/NTSB will make the determination on Surface's viability as an EFB...and I'm fairly certain they understand the requirements better than you. I would think that a company that pinches pennies in every area that doesn't affect the customer experience would be a good one to fly. After all, it's our fares that are paying for this stuff. I'm not suggesting that the cost savings between Surface and iPad are going to show up in the price of a ticket, but if it points to a larger practice of being a thrifty corporate entity, then I'm all for it. Did you miss the part of the article that said Delta rolled iPads in their airport restaurants? They understand the desire to use an ipad, no doubt. They simply decided to put those ipads in the most visible place...where their customers could use them.
And as for your "Under the Dome" reference...we're talking about a show about a town stuck under an impenetrable glass dome, whose secrets are somehow connected to butterflies, but you felt the use of MS Mobile products by so many people was unrealistic?
Did you miss the part about how much the two year delay will cost?
we are looking at more of Ballmer's last hurrah. whatever bribe he offered Delta, the Surface (RT) 2 is DOA. there won't be any 2 or 3 for Delta IT whores to use next year at all. the next MS CEO is going to bury this sad misadventure. MS will double down on the Pro because that is Gates' folly, and he ain't gone - yet. but the RT is a total dead end.
I heard that all of the recent Delta/Microsoft decisions were the direct order of Delta's CEO, Richard Anderson. He and Ballmer have been friends for a long time. Both of them have strong ties to Detroit and frequently overlap at events like The National Summit. Look for an article in the April 2012 Sky magazine for some of their candid conversations.
Not true. The majority are Apple fanatics. The Delta team has *excellent* ties to Cupertino and the two companies collaborated heavily to get the FlyDelta app launched (note how frequently it shows up in marketing images when Apple needs to use an icon).
When Delta's technology committee was charged with a new point-of-sale method, they recommended Apple. With the tablet tests winding down, IT recommended keeping the iPads. There's speculation that neither report was read by Richard, as the Delta executive team had already been swayed by the insider deal Microsoft offered.
PS: The flight attendants hate the Lumias too, so it's not just the pilots who are disappointed.
If this is true, this is the real story here, and be it noted that it was DED's digging for pilot opinion that brought it out.
Someone should tell Gruber to get off his high horse and do some of his own digging, rather than poke fun at AI as he did today in reference to this story.
However, in anything that matters—anybody remember the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies? Of course, on NBC, we only saw a split second of the BSoD, and they immediately picked up again after an unknown period of time. Like Tex Johnson's barrel roll in the 707 prototype over the 1955 Gold Cup, it may be 30 years before it emerges from the Memory Hole and we get the details. The thing to take away is: this is what happens when Microsoft has a literal army working on something for years! Sorry, anything critical to a plane in flight should have no connection to Microsoft whatsoever!
BSODs were by and large caused by poorly written third-party hardware drivers running in XP and earlier. The 2008 opening ceremony used XP, and given the rampant windows piracy in China, who knows if it was supported by microsoft? At any rate, by designing the Surface in-house MS avoids the very problem of obscure third-party drivers.
Comments
Delta does have an excellent app which is easily the best app in their market.
Add in at least another $13 million when the Surface drops off the market and Delta has to spend a year or so retooling for iPads. Time lost to the competition: 3 years.
Of course, $20-30 million is nothing for Microsoft, especially when their public persona is concerned, so I suspect there's a hidden clause in the contract that will allow Delta to recoup at least some of that loss if Microsoft abandons the tablet market. Unfortunately, that'll do nothing for the "our bosses are idiots" loss of morale by flight crews.
Years ago, I knew someone with a company whose salesmen felt they needed full-sized cars to carry all their samples. They were ticked off when a penny-pinching management forced them into compact cars. Their supervisor came up with a response. They would add oil when it got low, but they'd never, never get the oil changed.
I hope Delta is buying a lot of extras, because my hunch is that those Surface 2s are going to suffer from quite a few accidents.
No he's Japanese and trying write in English which he probably does much better than you write in Japanese. Either way we understood the message but unfortunately it seems to fail anyway because outsourcing customer support to India has almost nothing to do with US companies' IT departments trying to keep themselves employed. I doubt the pilots would be calling customer support anyway.
Actually Jjaro is Japanese and the original poster, Maestro64, is from Philadelphia!This reminds me of a recent TV show that I was watching, "Under the Dome". I saw numerous Windows phones and Surface tablets in that TV series. The way that they were featured was so in your face and so obvious, that it could only have been a paid product placement by Microsoft. It was totally unrealistic to see a product that is a certified flop pop up all over a TV show, but that hardly anybody uses in real life.
Haha, yes I noticed that as well! There are also a fair number of shows that have a large number of Apple products on show, but the difference is that they are always in a realistic setting. They've started using Surface tablets on NCIS: Los Angeles and I always groan when they start "touching and flicking" and the Surface display is clearly superimposed!unfortunately this is a story repeated daily all over the place. Clueless Microsoft drones forcing garbage Microsoft software on IT departments. The problem is the vast majority of IT people in the corporate world are totally useless idiots who have zero clue.
Maybe Microsoft could pay corporations to force their employees to search using IE and Bing.
they are starting to do this. Where i work they have the horrible WebSense nonsense which blocks all sorts of things. At least twice a month GOogle will be blocked along with Gmail for a few hours. Then i check BING and MSN/Hotmail//Live Mail/Outlook or whatever it is called this week and they magically work fine.
You know when you go to some remote part of a third world country and you see the whole town wearing t-shirts from 1980's tv shows or bands? Somebody obviously unloaded a warehouse of clothes they couldn't get rid of.
Sorry Delta pilots, that is you.
The move appeared to account for many of the WP7 phones that eventually sold, but didn't benefit Dell's struggling operations or enable either company to make headway into the mobile market.
Why are there two paragraphs about Dell in the middle of this article? Kinda confusing when "Dell" and "Delta" are pretty close, and there's no transitional sentence to explain the digression.
Microsoft in general needs to stay out of mission-critical applications. In "The enterprise" (Fu¢king god, how I hate that term! What a bunch of pretentious a$$holes!), it doesn't matter, because nothing that they're doing makes a bit of difference. It didn't make any difference when it was cubicle drones shuffling papers from one pile to another, and it doesn't make any difference now that it's cubicle drones clacking away on keyboards. (I remember when, for a computer to be "suitable for business use", all that was necessary was that it have a green-and-black text-only screen, because unless your every moment on the job was a living hell, you weren't earning your pay.)
However, in anything that matters—anybody remember the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies? Of course, on NBC, we only saw a split second of the BSoD, and they immediately picked up again after an unknown period of time. Like Tex Johnson's barrel roll in the 707 prototype over the 1955 Gold Cup, it may be 30 years before it emerges from the Memory Hole and we get the details. The thing to take away is: this is what happens when Microsoft has a literal army working on something for years! Sorry, anything critical to a plane in flight should have no connection to Microsoft whatsoever!
Did you miss the part about how much the two year delay will cost?
Hmm. Looks like somebody has to fill the pockets and pilots are aware of this.
we are looking at more of Ballmer's last hurrah. whatever bribe he offered Delta, the Surface (RT) 2 is DOA. there won't be any 2 or 3 for Delta IT whores to use next year at all. the next MS CEO is going to bury this sad misadventure. MS will double down on the Pro because that is Gates' folly, and he ain't gone - yet. but the RT is a total dead end.
The corporate world is so satisfying.
Its a reference to the movie 'thank you for smoking'
If this is true, this is the real story here, and be it noted that it was DED's digging for pilot opinion that brought it out.
Someone should tell Gruber to get off his high horse and do some of his own digging, rather than poke fun at AI as he did today in reference to this story.
However, in anything that matters—anybody remember the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies? Of course, on NBC, we only saw a split second of the BSoD, and they immediately picked up again after an unknown period of time. Like Tex Johnson's barrel roll in the 707 prototype over the 1955 Gold Cup, it may be 30 years before it emerges from the Memory Hole and we get the details. The thing to take away is: this is what happens when Microsoft has a literal army working on something for years! Sorry, anything critical to a plane in flight should have no connection to Microsoft whatsoever!
BSODs were by and large caused by poorly written third-party hardware drivers running in XP and earlier. The 2008 opening ceremony used XP, and given the rampant windows piracy in China, who knows if it was supported by microsoft? At any rate, by designing the Surface in-house MS avoids the very problem of obscure third-party drivers.