Donate tech

Let’s reflect today on the unselfish actions of the techie companies. Part of their Corporate Social Responsibility plan or not, and being done just to give a good external image or not, we can say that this type of actions have in the end a positive impact... Bill Gates for example is recognized, apart from being the richest man in the world, to be the biggest donor as well. One can think that with the amount of money that he owns that’s easy, but that’s a biased point of view… There are many other fortunes in this world that don’t even do this…

Apart from that there’s an initiative in Spain named ‘Project Dono’ where a tech NGO that is in charge of distributing products donated by Microsoft and Cisco to NGO’s and qualified foundations based in Spain to benefit from this project. The products are: operating system software, office software, publishing software and products for servers. The benefited associations have to comply with certain criteria and have to bear the administrative costs. They save a total of 96% of the market costs. It’s a way of helping these associations by giving them technology infrastructure to support their activities. A nice move from Microsoft to also improve their public image?

Plug & touch

Microsoft has recently launched Microsoft Surface, a product that is a service itself. It consists on a solution that works as a personal computer but the interface is tactile and very friendly. Usability becomes key in such applications. By this way they can make technology more accessible to those people that don’t feel comfortable when interacting with computers and other gadgets. Anyway, although this application is being aimed to the business segment, with this application Microsoft is also tackling the home connectivity business (easy: no keyboard nor mouse).

As you could read in the previous paragraph, we have named several concepts at the same time: product, service and application. Product in this example with ‘Surface’ could be more understood as the hardware itself and its features, which are assembled and executed by different applications. While the service could be defined at a higher level, like something more abstract that explains the purpose or the outcomes of the technology applied. How would you define the distinction between these different words?