Microsoft’s Baudboys head to San Francisco this week to compete for national a cappella singing title.
By Fred Albert
April 29, 2008
The Baudboys have been performing around Microsoft since the early 1990s. The current group includes (back row) Graham Sheldon, Ric Lewis, Owen Braun, Elliot Lewis, Dave McEwen and (front row) Jon Schwartz, Mark Adolph, Paul Eng.
It has all the makings of a Hollywood hit: Eight nerds band together to form a singing group. On the eve of the big competition, one of the members breaks his back, but the show goes on, and in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds, the geeks beat out the pros to nab the grand prize. Microsoft’s own Baudboys, an eight-man a cappella singing group, took top honors March 8 at the Pacific Northwest Harmony Sweepstakes, besting more experienced groups for the title of top a cappella group in the region, despite the fact that first tenor Ric Lewis had to spend much of the concert confined to a chair due to a degenerate disc.
“The fact that we won Northwest Harmony Sweeps was the upset of the year, because we were going up against six other professional groups,” marveled Dave McEwen, Baudboys president and a content project manager for Developer and Platform Evangelism. “When they finally announced who won, we were all in shock.”
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New “vertical campus” in Boston area gives Microsoft a presence in a bustling tech community. Recruit-rich MIT and Harvard are nearby.
By Steve Birge
Microsoft’s new vertical campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, occupies this building very close to Harvard, MIT, and downtown Boston.
Microsoft is working to dispel the perception by many in the United States that it is a Seattle company.
It has development offices in Silicon Valley, North Dakota, North Carolina, and sales offices elsewhere in the U.S. Its extensive global presence includes development centers in India, Ireland, Israel, and China.
Now, in hopes of stepping even farther away from its Seattle-centric image, Microsoft is substantially expanding its presence in the Boston area. It opened offices there last fall and now is aggressively recruiting for a “vertical campus” in Cambridge, an office that will have many groups on separate floors in one building, as opposed to Redmond’s “horizontal” campus model. The new campus is located across the Charles River from downtown Boston, in the heart of the East Coast’s hottest technology center and down the road from technology powerhouses MIT and Harvard.
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Software Design Engineer Jeffrey Kafer parlayed an interest in acting into a part-time career doing voice-overs. His fledgling efforts have already earned him honors.
By Fred Albert
Jeffrey Kafer says that voice-over work gives him a creative outlet without taking him away from his family or his job as an SDET. It’s even earned him an award.
April 14, 2008
Jeffrey Kafer spends a lot of his time in the closet. And if he has his way, he won’t be coming out any time soon.
The closet in question is in Kafer’s Monroe, Washington, home. A scant four feet square, it doubles as a recording studio, where the 35-year-old software design engineer in test pursues his dream of becoming a voice-over artist. Poised at a microphone surrounded by sound-deadening sweaters and blankets, he records lines from commercials, films, software, and books, hoping to become the next James Earl Jones or—at the very least—Don Pardo. “I’ve been known to be in my closet for two or three hours every night,” Kafer laughed.
Kafer’s interest in voice-over work was a natural outgrowth of his involvement in theater. He started acting in his teens and participated in community theater and college improv groups for the next 20 years. But as he got older, other responsibilities took precedence. “I got married and had two kids and just couldn’t devote three or four nights a week to rehearsals,” Kafer explained.
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Social tools show job applicants what it’s really like to work at Microsoft.
By Steve Birge
Microsoft's social-oriented recruiting initiatives include the Facebook page Workin' it @ MSFT.
Anybody who’s looked for a new job knows that the job posting rarely gives a real sense of what it would be like to work at the new place. It’s particularly challenging if the position is new or rare.That’s exactly the problem staffing consultant Terry Jordan was having when he filled an escalation engineer position recently. Applications were few, and people he did hear from were confused about what an escalation engineer does. At a global staffing conference, he met colleagues who suggested adding a
podcast of an escalation engineer talking about what the job entails.
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It took a proposal from Steve Ballmer to entice a promising computer science student to consider a career at Microsoft. Now she’d like to see more women and minorities follow her lead.
By Fred Albert
March 3, 2008
Steve Ballmer asked Miya McClain to intern at Microsoft when the two appeared at a technology event five years ago.
Miya McClain was 18 years old when Steve Ballmer made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.The college freshman was at a Seattle hotel demonstrating an internship project for a gathering of high-tech executives when Ballmer stepped up to the dais. After delivering his keynote address, he stood before the crowd and offered McClain an internship at Microsoft.
“I wasn’t going to apply for the Microsoft college internship,” confided McClain, now 24 and a software design engineer in test for Office. “I was just going to intern at other, smaller companies like I had in high school.” But when the CEO of Microsoft offers you a position in front of a room full of industry hotshots, how can you say no? Representatives from other companies swooped in to counter Ballmer’s offer, but it was too late. The die was cast.
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A writer for MSW shares his experience going through LASIK. Microsoft’s benefits provided incentive for the vision correcting surgery.
By Joshua Isaac
February 18, 2008
“Look at the light, Josh,” the doctor said.
Joshua Isaac poses with his wife Kim, and children Jacob, Sam, and Sophie prior to LASIK eye surgery. He used corrective lenses for over 20 years.
From what I’ve been told, that’s not something one should do in an operating room during a procedure—or is that run to the light?—but despite what I’ve heard, I try anyway to focus on the small orange blinking light. My right eye surgery went fine just minutes earlier, but my left eye refuses to stay in one place. It keeps crawling back from the light and the doctor’s wishes.
“Keep looking at the light.”
Of course I want to shut my eyes, but a small clamp holds the lids open. I peer as best I can into the light. Meanwhile, three technicians shuffle around me in the darkened operating room as the doctor pokes away. After a brief suction noise that goes “swoosh-swoosh,” followed by a slight buzzing, the procedure ends—no more than 20 minutes in all.
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The Shared Source Initiative makes publicly available the source code for many of Microsoft’s core products, including Windows and Office. And the company’s okay with that.
By Steve Birge
“I know customers are super excited to get access to source,” said Shawn Burke, a director in DevDiv’s .NET Development Platform. “It’s something they’ve wanted for a long time.”
Believe it or not, there are non-Microsoft people digging into the kernel source code for Windows, Office, and other prized corporate assets.
Before you start to worry too much, the company knows about it and, in fact, encourages it. Don’t think the company has gone all open source on you. It’s part of the Shared Source Initiative (SSI), whereby almost anyone – including customers, partners, developers, academics, and governments worldwide – can access and work with actual source code of many Microsoft technologies.
Since 2002, more than 80 technologies have been made available through the SSI, including a set of .NET framework libraries just released for sharing in mid-January. Additionally, more than 600 non-Microsoft technologies have been released under a Shared Source license.
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Once considered a niche player, Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business is now a robust and growing business, and one of the company’s most promising.
By Joshua Isaac
January 25, 2008
Microsoft will celebrate the releases of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on February 27 in Los Angeles.
Microsoft’s formal launch of its next generation of server and tools software next month will help solidify the Server & Tools Business’s position as a formidable and growing competitor in this crucial market.But it wasn’t always this way.
At the Windows 2000 launch eight years ago, Microsoft demonstrated its commitment to the enterprise business by lining the stage with servers powered by Windows Server 2000. The launch foretold a breakthrough for STB, which would grow into a market leadership position.
The launch in San Francisco in February 2000 conveyed Microsoft’s willingness to bet big on the server business despite doubts voiced by the press and a crowded field of competitors.
How wrong those skeptics were.
An InfoWorld article from the week of the launch captured the prevailing sentiment. One analyst said Microsoft’s growth rate was tapering off in the server space. Another commented that with the range of options now available, such as Linux and hosted applications, Microsoft wouldn’t be able to rely on the dominance of Windows with hardware manufacturers and ISVs to be successful.
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Employees report increased productivity and reduced stress, thanks to The Connector. The free Microsoft bus service is poised for expansion.
By Fred Albert, January 24, 2008
The Connector offers two models of buses: a 28-seater for city streets and a 49-seater (shown) for suburban routes.
It used to take Bryan Rutberg anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes to drive from his Seattle home to Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Unfortunately, the drive home was much less predictable, occasionally stretching to two hours due to the daily backups on Highway 520. “It drove me crazy and sent my blood pressure skyrocketing,” said Rutberg, director of the Redmond Executive Briefing Center. It got to the point where he stopped drinking water after 2 p.m., for fear of being trapped in traffic when nature called.
Three or four times a week now, Rutberg leaves his Saturn LS2 at home and commutes via The Connector, the free, WiFi-equipped bus service that Microsoft introduced to much fanfare last September. The Connector picks Rutberg up one and a half blocks from his home on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill and deposits him at the Overlake Transit Center bordering the Microsoft campus, where a shuttle transports him to his office.
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Graphic designer Iosefatu Sua has three designs among the available selections that reflect his Pacific Island heritage as a native of New Zealand.
The Zune Originals program lets consumers design their own devices. Professional artwork choices for new Zunes include graphics from two employees.
By Steve Birge
With more than a million Zune players sold, how can you pick yours out in a crowd? Thanks to the new Zune Originals program, you can give yours a personal touch by adding professional graphic artwork from its Artists Series. The back of the device can be laser-engraved with one of 27 designs created by internationally recognized artists, including two Microsoft employees.
Cutting-edge graphic art gives the device a strong statement of individuality, said Thomas Markert, Zune Entertainment creative director.
“Zune Originals at the top level allow consumers the ability to literally build their own Zune,” he said. “The consumer picks a color and then has engraved whatever they like on it, whether it’s five lines of text, a smaller design called a ‘tattoo,’ with or without text, or a design from the Artists Series. With that, the device is all yours, totally different than what you’d buy at retail.”
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