Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

Robert, I agree with you. But be careful. Please.

The whole incident was slashdotted for one reason only - it involed a MS competitor. Yeah yeah, there is much more to the story, but slashdotting it was solely because of this.

So what's my point? Just this: it is ALL about context. All of it. MS has just cause for dismissal. Just as you have just cause to use the word 'dumb'. Yet, MS _is_ MS. And nowadays, so are you. Longhorn blogs? Scoble? Sure, they have circumstancial context to you. Nonetheless, you are NOW associated with MS. And what you say bears more - more than this idiot - on MS than you think.

Notice.... I can call this guy an 'idiot' and get away with it without being slashdotted. That's purely 'cuz I'm anonymous. But I fear you can no longer call the same idion 'dumb' without many considering that it's really in context of MS considering him dumb.

He should not have posted the picture. Microsoft had the right to fire him.

But should they have fired him? No. It was pretty harmless and they could have told him to take it down, never do it again and the problem would be solved. Now you have MSNBC writing about how Microsoft canned this guy for blogging, not good pr.

As usual Robert you are still excellent in your language moderation ;-))
Well I find this time you started to have more experience in the choice of your words. I hope someday that you will understand that the world is not divided between you and the 'dumbs', it's a bit more subtle than that !
This privy as you called him reckon he did a mistake, but IMHO Microsoft PR didn't do the best in this case. Some folks called this kind of privy 'disposable'. So named that you can fire this 'cattle' easily. Not sure sometimes I am living in the 21st century.Thanks god I am not working in US !

MS was wrong. Not only was the picture harmless, but they increased the focus on the picture by firing the guy instead of speaking to him and reasoning with him and asking if he could take the image down.

In The Netherlands, he would not have been fired. Simply because we have laws here who force the employer to come up with a valid reason to fire a person. A shabby image of a crate of boxes is not a valid reason, sorry.

Well said Frans ;-)

You just can't go around taking pictures of things that come off trucks. Sure, maybe the punishment was a little too harsh, but he was a temporary employee from an outside company. He wasn't even an intern, nor a full time Microsoft employee. I'd be a little upset if one of my temp. employees was going around taking pictures of things that are coming off the trucks and putting them on his web site. What else could he be taking pictures of?

Who knows, maybe Apple will offer him a job.

One correction: I believe the guy was a temp, not an intern (can you even fire interns?).

As for whether it was right or wrong to "fire" him, I'd probably have made the same decision. Good judgement is an important job skill, and he doesn't seem to have it. If it was an employee, I would bet they would have gotten warned, not fired. As others have noted, what's not clear is whether he had any prior performance or judgement problems, etc.

It's absolutely true, IMO, that if you take away the Macs, there'd be no story here, not because Microsoft wants to hide the fact that they purchase Macs, but because then there wouldn't be a reason for people to imply that they do.

Thanks guys for the valid points. I'll take that into consideration next time. I'm still getting used to this whole "being associated with Microsoft" thing. Thanks for the advice.