Do you think that promotional products work?

If the company at which you work creates mostly amazing products, but you think that a few of them kind of suck, should you as an employee still feel obligated to use them? Is it okay to use a competitors product at work?

• Answer:

  Whether or not it is OK to use a competitor's product at work depends largely on whether or not your employer has a policy which forbids (or condones) the use of the competitor's product at work.  If no such policy exists, the best course of action would be to ask for clarification. There are scenarios with easy answers, for example it's common to do interoperability testing with competing products, and it would be silly to completely prohibit such testing.  But if the competing products are processing sensitive information and are in a position to transmit sensitive information back to the "mothership" then there are reasonable arguments to forbid their use. Personal use of competing products is another matter, unless of course there are company policies that apply to personal use.  In the absence of such policies...  well, I've heard passionate arguments both ways, for a variety of reasons.  But none of the arguments I've heard yet have been persuasive, so I won't bother repeating them here.  But you can guess from the following phrases: enriching competitors; loyalty; competitive research; learn from the mistakes of others; learn from the strengths of others; think outside the box; get outside the bubble; obligation (or lack thereof), and so on. As you might guess, this is a subject that comes up with some regularity among my fellow Microsoft employees, particularly regarding mobile phone operating systems and web browsers. I'm at home and I'm typing this in Chrome, so that tells you where I stand. :-)