Microsoft Corporation Company Review

Microsoft Corporation Company Review INTRODUCTION Computers have come to be vital technologies in every single line of work at present. Bulk of the present obligations and tasks being completed at assorted firms and associations are by now computer-based, and this is a sure signal that they are keen to invest deeply in these technologies to make their procedures far extra competent and productive. Even if the computer multimedia marketplace is loaded alongside tough competitors, there is no mistrust that Microsoft is method in front of the pack in words of being the most reliable and progressive computer multimedia producing firm all above the world. Its large resources and competent people have allowed the association to produce a expansive array of produce that are able to address the disparate computing needs and hobbies of its globe customers. Microsoft’s attendance all above the globe has additionally come to be stronger above the past couple of years as the firm aims to distinct itself from the rest of the contest and h ave a stable grasp at the top spot of the computer multimedia and hardware industry. With CEO Steve Ballmer grasping the date-to-date procedures of the firm, Microsoft has honestly not ever looked back and has stayed forceful and lucrative even as the present commercial disaster has negatively altered the procedures of its competitors. Specialists forecast that Microsoft will tolerate to solidify its by now dominant locale in the computer multimedia and hardware industry above the subsequent couple of years as they retain on maximising their profitability and comprehensive globe reach. COMPANY BACKGROUND Microsoft Corporation is the leading software company with at least one of its product on virtually every computer on this planet. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company on April 4, 1975. Bill Gates is among the top 3 richest person in this world as declared by Forbes Magazine. Microsoft Corporation deals in developing, licensing designing a range of software products. It also manufactures and sells hardware products. The company has products in entertainment consoles like Xbox360 and Kinect for Xbox. Role of organisational behaviour at the company Microsoft Corporation has a wide range of products under its belt. It is critical for a company of this size to manage its organisational strategies and behaviour to sustain in the market and its position. The company functions in five segments: Windows and Windows Live Division, Server and Tools, Online Services Division Microsoft Business Division. In recent times, Microsoft has given importance to the concept of sustainability. It has initiated an unusual strategy of taxing internal fee on carbon. It will charge its clients for every ton of carbon it produces that means they will charge to recycle every ton of carbon produced. However, it has pointed out a few major reasons this strategy: Behaviour Change – Microsoft aims to reduce the overall carbon emissions and energy utilisation. They have analysed previous reports and emphasised on the use of renewable energy to increase the efficiency. As per the statement by Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist, if someone decides to use carbon based power resources, they’ll be charge an additional fee as a tax to discourage such pathways. Organisation Accountability – Microsoft has learnt from the past to imply new changes to the organisation, it needs to divide it into smaller divisions. The executives that run that facility will be empowered to address any sustainability concerns to drive better efficiency figures and adopt greener power resources. It initiated to tax on carbon power use internally before charging its external clients. Risk Reduction – Microsoft has encouraged all its employees to understand the energy related risks. Microsoft has begun to address its employees and customers to operate through cloud-based services. They utilize significantly their own power and reduce predictable variable cost that brings down the costs and adds to the renewable energy figures. Sales at Vendor Choice – Through its customer feedbacks and previous reports analysis, they have found that the customers are in search of reliable service providers at lower costs and lower carbon emissions. Thus, they have emphasised on alternative energy resources to land new customers and expand their operations with existing clients. (http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/05/microsoft-taxes-itself/) Human Resource Management Human Resource at Microsoft is a priority as the company drives on the path of success based on their employee’s performance. In the beginning, Microsoft used to recruit employee based on their experience over intelligence. But during the slow down of the company’s success, it realised that their employee performance was going down. Bill Gates re-invented the recruitment strategy model by recruiting intelligent staff over experienced staff. According to his experience, he found that intelligence drives aggression in performance. CEO Steve Ballmer says, â€Å"whenever you meet a kick-ass guy, get him† (Bartlett 2). They re-modeled the human resource hiring strategy policies: Attract retain employees, Increase organizational insight, Store and access employee information, Personalize Role Centers to speed productivity Provide online access with employee Portal. Soon, realizing that employee’s are the greatest assets of a company. Microsoft’s strate gies started to reflect this philosophy. The human resource management had the following steps: Recruitment selection, Employee motivation, Employee loyalty satisfaction and Employee rewards. They broke down projects and decided to coherent a strategy of center of excellence to enhance project timing and coordination. Thus, you can measure Microsoft’s success in the recent years based on their employee performance and efficiency. (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en/za/products/ax-hr-management.aspx) (http://mgmt.talkingvillage.com/article.x/1866) International Business Technology Management Microsoft partners with CA Technologies to address its top IT needs. IT companies face fierce competition and challenges like sustainability, IT innovation, management and greener computing. It delivers solutions combine current technology with advanced technology. Technology helps to maximise investments along with security and redundancy to match with the current and future business goals. (http://www.ca.com/us/partners/spotlights/microsoft-corporation.aspx) Analysis of entrepreneurship and innovation at the company Future Strategies Management Adaptive Systems and Interaction: The Adaptive Systems Interaction group (ASI) pursues research on automated reasoning, adaptation, and human-computer interaction. Interests of the group include principles and applications of decision-making and learning, computation in the face of complexity, techniques for information management and search, and the development and evaluation of innovative designs for visualization and interaction. Research goals include both the pursuit of basic science and the development of computing and communications applications that demonstrate new functionalities and flexibility. ASI is at the center of user modelling at Microsoft Research, focused on inferring the goals and needs of users from multiple sources of information about activity and interests. The group is also home to research on information retrieval and management, including work in automated text classification and clustering. The ASI team continually attempts to identify new means for enriching the user experience through advances in automated reasoning and user interface design. (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/adapt/) Speech technology: Our main aim is to craft requests that make computers obtainable everywhere, and work alongside our product-side partners to make this vision a reality. We are interested not merely in crafting state-of-the-art articulated speech constituents and additionally in how these disparate constituents can come jointly alongside supplementary modes of human-computer contact to form a fused, consistent computing environment. We are pursuing countless undertakings to aid us grasp our vision of a fully speech-enabled computer. (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/srg/) Natural Language Processing: The aim of the Natural Speech Processing (NLP) group is to design and craft multimedia that will examine, comprehend, and produce tongues that humans use naturally, so that in the end you will be able to address your computer as nevertheless you were addressing one more person. This aim is not facile to reach Understanding speech way, amid supplementary things, knowing what thoughts a word or phrase stands for and knowing how to link those thoughts jointly in a meaningful way. Its ironic that usual speech, the signal arrangement that is easiest for humans to discover and use, is hardest for a computer to master. Long afterward mechanisms have proven capable of inverting colossal matrices alongside speed and grace, they yet flounder to chief the basics of our articulated and composed languages. We address these setbacks employing a blend of knowledge-engineered and statistical/machine-learning methods to disambiguate and answer to usual speech input. Our work has implications for requests like text assessing, data retrieval, question responding, summarization, gaming, and translation. The syntax checkers in Workplace for English, French, German, and Spanish are outgrowths of our research; Encarta uses our knowledge to reclaim answers to user questions; Intellishrink uses usual speech knowledge to compress cellphone messages; Microsoft Product Prop uses our contraption translation multimedia to elucidate the Microsoft Vision Center into supplementary languages. As our work evolves, we anticipate it to enable each span whereas human users can benefit by conversing alongside their computers in a usual way. (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/nlp/)

Venice Commentary

Tyler Every March 25, 2013 Written Commentary 6: Venice by Jan Morris The author’s purpose is to describe the setting by contrasting her culture to Venice and by using irony to display the people, surroundings and daily life. A mother who just started living in Venice is telling us about the setting and her life in Venice. She uses irony, humor and contrast to build the imagery of the city and people. Throughout the passage the author uses irony to convey the surroundings and the image that the city is not somewhere you would want to live in.The irony of her arguments is that her reasoning in why Venice isn’t a pleasant city to live in, because it is â€Å"inescapably urban,† (line 8) and that there are no gardens for kids to play. A worthy excerpt is â€Å"It is not altogether an easy city for children to live in. It has no dangerous traffic and few unspeakable rascals; but Venice is inescapably urban, and only lucky children with gardens, or with parents indul gent enough to take them to the distant park, have somewhere green to play† (Lines 7-9).She uses false dilemma by focusing only on the black and white of Venice. She focuses on that Venice has no garden, so that she still misses her culture and country. She focuses only on the immoral instead of the safety or great things about Venice. She sees Venice being inescapably urban as a gigantic dilemma while she says it is a rigid city to live in; it has no dangerous traffic and rascals. Here the mother uses sarcasm to present humor during the passage. The protagonist also uses irony when describing actions, people and the setting.Morris uses two words in pair like sickly intensity, unashamed delight, exquisitely ludicrously, inescapably urban, blithe pathetic, lugubriously assure, dauntingly spotless and frighteningly well informed. Using two words that are opposite, Morris creates irony. By juxtaposing these words, Morris also creates imagery. It creates an image of what the mothe r sees as an outsider. Through her eyes we see Venice as a city filled with buildings and houses and no green gardens because of the surrounding buildings.The author uses detail and diction to indicate her attitude toward the Venetian people. She does this mostly in the first and second paragraph. â€Å"Venetian mothers show signs of instant cardiac crisis if little Giorgio ventures within six feet of water† (line 2-3), she makes fun of venetian mothers by pointing out that they will have a cardiac crisis when their children are close to the water, they are to over protective of their children. The humor in this is that Venice, Italy is surrounded by water, and so Venetian mothers would be losing their cool for their little Giorgio.With these details and diction, she is making a mockery of the Venetian people. â€Å"Venetian children are exquisitely, if sometimes rather ludicrously dressed: the minutest little baby girls† (lines 3-4), minutest means extremely small, by using repetition, the author is emphasizing the point that the mother doesn’t like the Venetians because she criticizes them throughout the passage. Using exquisitely and ludicrously who are on complete other spectrums in terms of meaning. The children are beautiful, but at times foolish. Blithe but pathetic are the groups of urchins to be found entertaining themselves† (line 10) blithe and pathetic are two contrasting words. The mother also stoops so low by calling the children urchins again going to mischievous and raggedly dressed. The author also uses humor to appeal to our sense and keeping us attracted. Humor is present in â€Å"When the Doge’s palace was burnt in 1479, the only record left of Petrarch’s inscriptions upon the walls was the notebook of Marin Sanudo, who had taken the trouble to copy them down when inspecting the palace at the age of eight. He went on to write a history of the world in fifty-five volumes)† (lines 30-33). It mad e me laugh the thought of seeing little Giorgio next to the water while his mother loses her cool. The last two sentences leave us with a wisecrack about the Venetians. When the Doge’s Palace burnt they had no copies of Petrarch’s inscriptions except the one of a child’s notebook. It is hilarious to think that they had to copy someone’s notebook’s writing or put that as their historical record. Also saying that this kid went on to write the history of the world in fifty-five volumes is absurd.Who would ever do this? The mother leaves us with this remark again mocking the Venetians for their â€Å"lack of intellect and absurdity† and reliance on a kid’s notebook. When reading that this kid later writes the history in fifty-five volumes, the author creates this image that the Venetians lack the purity of Petrarch’s records and that their claimed knowledge from the child’s notebook might be terribly wrong. Thus, leaving us laughing at the Venetians and proving her point of mockery.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) delivers vital health care services, sex education, and sexual health information to millions of women, men, and young people. As stated in their website, they â€Å"deliver comprehensive and medically accurate information that empowers women, men, teens, and families to make informed choices and lead healthy lives. Planned Parenthood is proud of its vital role in providing young people with honest sexuality and relationship information in classrooms and online†.If we are to evaluate their services and advocacy based on the criteria of evaluating the merit of benefit types, we can say that their services cater to the idea of consumer sovereignty. This benefit type is basically focused on providing choices to the consumer or target market of Planned Parenthood’s services. The organization basically advocates a Pro-Choice approach when it comes to birth control methods which runs counter to many principles advocated by relig ious groups.Planned Parenthood’s approach basically counters the idea of coercion and intrusion into the privacy lives of individuals, basically in making choices about birth control methods, sex education, and women’s health. However, this kind of liberalistic thinking is unacceptable in some cultures. Thus, although the organization promotes the improvement of the sexual health and well-being of individuals and families globally, their actions run counter to conservative cultures and organizations (especially the churches).Although it has local partners in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean their advocacy for promoting women’s choice when it comes to birth control makes them a bitter opponent against the establishment. Their vocal and outspoken global partners are considered to be intruding already into the privacy of families and society in general. That somehow dilutes the benefits that are provided by the organization to the public, by shifting the focus of the public from the benefits of their advocacy to the harmful effects of their group’s activist actions.

Research Papers for College

Research Papers for College This research paper will focus on the analysis and comparison of the education level and effectiveness of particular educational systems on the college level. The scale of the analysis is based on comparison of college education systems in the following countries: UK, USA and Germany. The choice of the countries for this research was determined by the following factors: †¢ History and stability of the educational system All three countries have deep history of the development of educational system and well-established processes in this sphere as well. This helps the analysis and allows for gathering of valuable and reliable data. †¢ Average level of education in the country In order to identify the criteria for the selection of the countries for this research paper, it was decided to choose the educational systems, where graduates with college degree have relatively similar knowledge portfolio. †¢ Percentage of literate education in the country Based on the Bureau of Statistics of other responsible governmental institutions, the research group performed preliminary analysis of the educational statistics in the selected countries. The objective of these criteria is to ensure that selected sample can represent the population of the research. †¢ Differences in the educational processes Main target of the sample selection, apart from all the above criteria, is to choose the countries with similar college portfolio, but at the same time significant differences in the process or product design. These differences, that distinguish further effects and specifics of the education, will determine the scope of the analysis and help the writer provide recommendations and practical evaluation of the educational level and gaps in these processes in mentioned countries and educational systems.