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Well I just got back from my first MSFT company meeting. It was quite an affair. Demos of so many cool things (I can’t talk about), pyrotechnics, celeb MCs, and of course lots of swag. It was quite overwhelming, but at the same time it was the first time in my career since working at a startup that I felt fired up to be part of something important. Ballmer, love him or hate him, is an excellent speaker and does know how to get people motivated and fired up. The management are true nerds in every sense of the word (and I love that). They eat, drink and sleep their products and it shows. I think this keeps them real in the sense that they remember what it was like to develop software and therefore personal contributions are appreciated and rewarded. This does, of course, make them quite ackward at being slick or selling fish to a fisherman. That’s where Apple shines.

MSFT is one crazy machine and even with 25k people filling half of Safeco field for the meeting, they still manage to make people’s contribution feel valuable. This is very odd since the outsider’s view of the company is that you are some cog in a machine locked in an office lost among thousands of others. I would argue the opposite in my short tenure, but ask me again in a few years.

Oh, and the new ads are quite cool…
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I’m a PC…can’t believe I’m excited to say that.