Microsoft Unveils "Elevate America" 325
nandemoari writes "In response to the current economic crisis, Microsoft Corp. has come out with a stimulus plan of their own. Their goal is to help a large group of individuals use their computers to land employment in ways other than to generate a compelling resume. The new online initiative, Elevate America, is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in the field of technology."
Re:Clearly, (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, they claim to be training Americans, but they're training them for jobs that are disappearing [nytimes.com] forever. [digg.com]
Discount Certifications (Score:1, Interesting)
Seems like they're offering discount MS specific certifications, with a free retake if you fail. In short it seems like they're offering a whole load of taxdeductable services that relate to their own product lines, but with the PR and marketing machine that MS has behind them makes it look like they are actually helping America - good on them for trying.
I wonder if IBM or Oracle will have a similar strategy to "elevate" America?.....
Good strategy for MS (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a good strategy for MS, much like what Apple had with school districts - teach as many people in ways that make them dependent on your proprietary technology as you can, and call it a public service.
In my opinion, the underlying problem in this economy is thus: The rich portion of the populace owns about as much as is possible before the economy collapses. Our market is based on speculation and expectation setting - on growth of money making schemes. But what happens when the players looking to take more resources run out of easy resources to grab? Collapse.
The poorer 3/4 of the country have spent about all they are going to spend, and have gone in about as deep a debt as is plasible. It no longer makes sense to lend more money, or leverage more resources in hopes of getting return from that process. The owning class already has already extracted as many resources as they easily can, and it would take death on the part of the poorest folks to free any more resources to grab.
The only way left to continue the desired cycle and free up credit would be to take resources from the rich, and give it to folks who would actually spend those resources in the process of just living day to day, which would open up the credit markets again, increase demand for products, and so on.
But we've seen what outrage occurs when that happens - the whole point of the market for the larger players is to extract more resources, not give money to the "undeserving!" So, we get schemes like those from Microsoft - push for further ownership of mindshare, and call it charity.
Ryan Fenton
Re:its only MS Training (Score:3, Interesting)
Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Second: Microsoft's slump is probably due more to peoples' general (and increasing) dissatisfaction with Microsoft than anything else. But the economy will hurt them, too. Maybe a lot. After all, a 5-year-old PC can run Linux just fine. But try Vista on it. Nope, didn't think so.
I would be willing to bet that Microsoft's slump lasts longer than any slump for Intel or AMD or Google.
And IBM? Who cares? When was the last time YOU bought something from IBM?
depends on what you mean by computer skills (Score:4, Interesting)
Some areas have large surpluses, others have large deficits. One area I'm familiar with with a deficit is anything to do with data analysis, due to the huge piles of data companies like Google and Facebook are building up that they don't do nearly as much with as they could. If you can convince a company that you're both technically competent when it comes to data mining, machine learning, etc., and have knowledge in some area that relates to something to do with it (marketing/customer stuff, artificial intelligence, even just information visualization), there are plenty of jobs.
Actually, in general, the best bet seems to be to have two useful skill areas that intersect in some reasonable way; really cuts down the competition as compared to going up against people in one area or the other in isolation.
Your tax dollars at work (Score:5, Interesting)
Elevate America has two main offerings, one available immediately and one that will be provided in partnership with state governments
Translation: MS will get money earmarked for retraining programs in order to flood the market with MS trained workers, depressing the wages of the latter and making their "TCO" so much more attractive.
You have to admire a company that is able to screw us coming and going.
Am I wrong? (Score:3, Interesting)
But didn't Microsoft just cut their workforce? http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11561 [zdnet.com]
I am sure it wasn't all in the US, but still one hand saying hey lets help American workers get the skills they need to get a job, and then cutting thousands of workers seems to be a bit conflicting in their messaging...
Re:MS in the resume is bad for you (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit.
Most interesting jobs are for people who can drive any car - whether it's a Toyota or a Renault.
We're a 50-50 linux shop (a big bank), and if you "I DON'T DO WINDOWS", we regard you as the same dogmatic crowd as "I'M SCARED OF LINUX, IT HAS A COMMAND LINE". The clueless crowd we don't hire.
If you're a professional systems engineer, you can manage anything (and code and script on it).
If you're dogmatic about a product, you're putting your religious beliefs (those that tack 'good' and 'evil' labels on things such as Microsoft, GNU or the open-source community) before the interests of your employer, and we wouldn't touch you with a 10-meter pole.
Best advice I can give is be ambivalent - get the fact you're a techie across. If you can sell yourself as an a-religious techie, you'll be in more demand.
Make a potential employer understand you'll do what is best for him, and you won't let your decisions for him be dictated either by your fear of one thing or religious dogma favoring the other.
A Reactive Attack on Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Several posters have mused that Microsoft's strategy is to flood the market with MSCEs and grow the market for themselves.
My general impression is that we've been hearing about organizations switching to Open Source solutions during the economic downturn due to lower costs.
Could this be Microsoft feeling threatened and reacting by counter-attacking?
Microsoft *is* big and is not going to die soon, that much is certain. But what's important is whether the trend is going up or down, and by how much. Being big just helps you control that (to some extent).
Re:MS in the resume is bad for you (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the OP was suggesting that you create your CV full of Linux skills, and then watch as the recruiters direct you to Linux jobs.
If you have, say, AS/400 mentioned once, as an aside, in a small paragraph, using a tiny font, as a insignificant part of your first job, that you never even touched but the company once had an AS/400, I can guarantee you will get recruiters calling about whether your AS/400 skills are up to date enough to be a sysadmin!
Remove all traces of MS from your CV and you will get only interesting jobs - embedded, mobile, Linux. You won't get called for the crowd of MS vb.net jobs that are out there. You don't have to mention anything about hating Microsoft either! (and you get bonus points when you turn up to the interview and can do Windows too).
Re:Disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think you can show causation here. Outsourcing had already begun; it wasn't caused by the "dot-com bubble".
I did look at the second link, which by the way was not a link to a story, but a link to a link to a story, which is very bad form. Regardless, quote: "Whose last big processor, the Nehalem, was designed and built in Bangalore".
Completely false. The Dunnington core, NOT Nehalem, was designed in Bangalore, and was the first and only chip so far to be designed there. Further, Dunnington is nothing more than a multi-core Penryn, which does not say very much about the Bangalore team: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3264 [anandtech.com]
Also, it was not BUILT there, but only designed there. And further yet, that has almost nothing to do with software development, which is the topic under discussion.
And lastly, if you had been involved with any of the international software freelancing sites, you would know that places like Pakistan, India, and any number of third-world countries are full of software development firms and individuals who are, according to their own horn-blowing, experts in virtually everything. You would also know that although they very often under-bid other developers, their reputation is terrible. More and more I have been seeing job offers on the international sites for software developers from "North America, South America, and Western Europe ONLY!"
Sure, outsourcing is bad for America. But the sitation is not as bad as it might appear... especially for software developers.
Re:That's great... (Score:2, Interesting)
Amen. This was confirmed in a Slashdot discussion a month or so ago when a poster said they once recruited for Microsoft. He said that the H-1B program essentially allowed Microsoft to find a larger pool of candidates fitting MS's exacting standards.
I then said something like, "Do you know the H-1B program was sold to the American people as a tool to solve an alleged "shortage" of technical workers, and not a tool to replace or bypass "C" citizens for "A" guest workers?"
His reply was that he really didn't follow the politics of it, only that the H-1B was effective in expanding MS's choice. This is consistent with other info I gathered on the issue.
There is no "shortage", only a desire to be picky for less.
Re:That's great... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're prediction of the demise of English as the World trade language is quite premature.
After all, the World speaks English not because of currency, but because of music and movies.
When the next Batman movie and T-Pain record come out in Farsi, then you can start talking about the "Death of English". And dubbing doesn't count. I speak Italian, but watching The Simpsons in la Lingua just isn't as good.
Re:That's great... (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt greatly that English will be a reasonable choice for trade language into the next decade.
No, I think English will be the common language for most of this century at least. Although the English that is commonly used ten years from now may be as foreign to our ears as the English of Shakespeare. English is evolving faster than it ever has before.
For over a decade, there have been more people who have learned English as a second language (ESL) than there are native speakers of English. At this point in time, there may be more ESL speakers than sum of all the native speakers of English who ever lived. If we ar not at that point yet, we soon will be.
We are also very close to the point where more communication in English is being done between ESL speakers than is being done between a native speaker of English and an ESL speaker. It is common in FOSS projects to find a Finn, a Brazilian, and a Japanese person using English in their correspondence while they fix a bug or develop a feature.
Would someone who knows how to do it propose a Slashdot poll for me? Something like this:
It would be neat to see this done every couple of years, see what the trend is.
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
XBox 360 - Chipset made by IBM
Playstation 3 - Chipset made by IBM
Wii - Chipset made by IBM
I think most gamers care .....