I worked for Microsoft for almost 7 years, from 1996 to 2003. There were good times and less-good times. The beginning was terrific, when I got to work with the Mac Internet Explorer team (aka MS-Bay), a renegade bunch hired specifically to make Mac software that was not cloned from Windows applications. Early Mac IE was a great browser, designed and built specifically for the Mac by veteran Mac programmers, and I learned a bunch from that team.
My job was writing documentation and, by default, doing press, evangelism, and PR, since nobody in Redmond wanted to spend much time doing special stuff for the Mac. It was a blast. I enjoyed the dissonance of working at hated Microsoft but being part of a group that produced an excellent Mac browser. Very often we won folks over, because we had a great product: I even convinced my former boss Guy Kawasaki that IE was better. But some people would not be persuaded. Once, at Macworld Expo, we were handing out CDs with Mac IE on them. One guy asked for extra CDs. Hey, great, I thought: a fan. No, he said: he liked to put them in the microwave. At another Macworld I was interviewed live on local radio while a crowd gathered behind me and made rude gestures. Ah, memories.
After the Mac team, the jobs weren't as great as often, but I stuck around. I liked a lot of things about Microsoft, but I also wondered how such smart people could turn out products that were, let's say, not always smart, and I wasn't a fan of all the company's business practices. I guess that makes me something of a hypocrite, because I stayed there for years. But when I saw the item pictured below in the Microsoft company store, I thought it was a great statement about the company and lock-in: get 'em while they're young.
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