J_K9 @ Linux

Day 6: Final Day at Microsoft

March 27, 2007 on 10:11 am | In Seattle 2007 |

Today was our final day at Microsoft. It is odd to think that, after being here for five days and visiting Microsoft’s headquarters so regularly that I will not be returning there for an indefinite amount of time, but not at least for the foreseeable future. I may dislike their business tactics and disagree with some of their products, but they have brilliant people working for them and have an excellent workplace environment. Anyway, I’ll leave the bad note until the end: let me tell you, in the usual detail what I did today.

Meeting Chris Capossela

We left the hotel at 7am and had breakfast at the cafe in one of the buildings on Microsoft’s campus because we did not want to be late for our meeting with Chris Capossela, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Business Division Product Management Group. It was a great privilege to meet such a senior Microsoft executive and talk to him for over half an hour, and it was remarkably kind of him to give up what little free time he has to talk to us. Chris Capossela was very relaxed and open when speaking to us, joking about the classic Windows 98 Blue Screen of Death and telling us how he worked his way up in the industry. He did so, in fact, very sporadically, by taking a wide range of jobs at Microsoft, whatever interested him, and being recognised for his achievements. I am glad that I got the opportunity to meet such a down-to-earth and important executive at Microsoft.

Project Thorntree Presentation

If you have been reading my blog, you will know that the Leadership Panel judged three of our presentations last Friday and decided that Project Thorntree, the second group which had devised a PDA-based guide map application, was the best of the three. Today, they were given the chance to present once again to another, more senior board. Unfortunately, the majority of the members of the second Panel had been given some work to complete over the weekend which had overrun and so they were unable to join us. However, Kim Akers, Microsoft’s General Product Manager of the Unified Communications Group, proved to be an excellent judge and posed some challenging questions and propositions to the Thorntree group, who delivered yet another stunning presentation.

Board of the Future

Next on the itinerary was an entry entitled “Board of the Future.” This is typically a group of students aged 17-24 who share their ideas on possible futures and how they believe technology will be integrated into our lives in the years to come. Ours, however, had a slightly different twist to it: our Board of the Future was aged 14-18 and our focus was mainly on the possible role of technology in school environments in the future. This meeting was led by Dan Rasmus, the Director of Information Work Vision. We were split into four groups of three people and each group carried out a thought process to attempt to discover and portray a particular extreme future using a questionnaire to help us document our thoughts.

The future my group was focused on was called “Frontier Friction,” the most dystopic of the four available futures. This is an extremely fragmented future in which everything is de-centralised, “bottom-up” if you will, and the world is certainly very bordered and restricted. There is no internet and the only societies which exist are those of the tightly-knit communities in each village whose inhabitants aid each other in all their work and struggle for survival. I really enjoyed pondering what the world may be like in this case in 2016 and sharing my ideas with the contrasting ones of the other groups, and I’d like to thank Dan for kindly dedicating so much of his time for our education.

Lunch and Meeting Tom Gallagher

I am very grateful to Josh Edwards for asking Tom Gallagher to have lunch with me. Tom Gallagher is the Security Test Lead of the Office brand, responsible for testing Microsoft Office for security vulnerabilities before it goes to market. He is widely acknowledged in the security community, having done such things as speaking about finding and preventing CSRF attacks at the 2006 BlackHat USA conference at Las Vegas and writing a book published by Microsoft Press entitled Hunting Security Bugs, which some of you should be familiar with.

Tom told me all about his day-to-day job over lunch, explaining what he and his team do, how they do it, how he got into the information security business (everyone has an interesting story!) and a lot more. He stressed the importance of not only finding the vulnerabilities but discovering who was in charge of that section of code and making sure that they did not make the same mistake twice. He was also kind enough to give me some career advice in terms of which universities might be more suitable for a security engineer, with an equal balance of theory and practice as well as extra-curricular self-teaching, and which programming languages might be useful to know if I wanted to enter information security. I found my talk with Tom highly motivating and revelatory and I sincerely hope that I meet him again in the near future – who knows, perhaps even at a conference. Thank you, Josh, for such a great opportunity!

Start-ups Discussion

We were then herded off to meet some of Microsoft’s entrepreneurs: Eric and Matt (forgive me, but I didn’t have time to write down their names). They had both started businesses before joining Microsoft but were there to talk to us about businesses that they had started under the Microsoft name and with Microsoft’s support and funding.

Eric went first, telling us how he was chosen to produce an accounting software to rival products such as Sage’s in an extremely short period of time. He told us how he had proposed a new business model which Microsoft had not previously widely exploited which was to release a simplified version of the program, Microsoft Office Accounting Express, for free with no time limit and no strings attached and then a more powerful version with enticing features which would be available as an upgrade or as part of an Office package.

Matt then told us about how he had designed the architecture and technology behind the Zune, having been stuck in a similar situation to Eric’s and with perhaps an even greater rival: the iPod. Again, the development/production time, from the moment the idea was accepted to the moment the first Zune was produced, was extremely short, just over three months if I remember correctly. This unbelievable short time period from the start to the end of the development of such a complicated product shows the quantity of resources Microsoft will be willing to put behind a start-up if they deem it a potentially viable product, a shot which is hopefully not in the dark.

It was also interesting to note that, if these start-ups take off, as the Xbox and subsequently the Xbox 360 did, the product’s teams are often allocated to buildings separate from Microsoft’s main campus in order to distance the product from the enterprise Microsoft image and allow the teams to work in their own personalised environment as they wish.

Xbox Play-Testing

We then drove over to Microsoft’s Millennium campus, in which the Xbox teams work. We headed into one of the play-testing labs and picked up one of several games on our way to our cubicle: Project Gotham Racing 3, Viva Pinata and a few others. I chose Project Gotham Racing 3 and sat down at a cubicle. Unfortunately, despite being covered by our NDAs, we were not allowed to play-test some of the alpha and beta games (such as Halo 3) because there were a few minors in the room and so Microsoft were not legally allowed to show us those games without our parents’ consent, which was not possible to gain due to the short-notice.

Before firing up the game, we were led through the surveys which we would have had to complete if we were play-testing a game which was under development. We were not allowed to fill them in ourselves because our parents would have had to sign a contract to allow us to provide written feedback to Microsoft about our experiences. However, after this short walkthrough, we were allowed to boot up our games and I jumped right into PGR3, one of the best car racing games ever (without a doubt).

Two highly important people visited us while we were play-testing (we did, of course, stop what we were doing when they entered). The first to visit us was Peter Moore, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, Entertainment and Devices Division. He complemented us and our school and answered any questions we had. He also left us a few gifts to collect on our way out. It was very kind of him to stop by and say hello, because I can’t imagine that he has little work to do!

The second to visit us was Chris Butcher, a senior engineer at Bungie Studios. Bungie Studios are the Microsoft-owned company behind the creation and development of the Halo series of games. The third iteration of this series is currently under development and will be released later this year. Chris was more than glad to answer our questions on game development, so I asked him which his favourite development stage was (pre-production, production, post-, etc and more granular ones) and how difficult it was to port Xbox 360 games to different platforms, to which I received satisfying answers. Chris also left us some gifts, and we are all very grateful for that.

We spent a substantial amount of time gaming (great fun! :D) after which we thanked those who had attended us during our visit and drove off to Microsoft’s Store, for we had been given the extremely rare opportunity as non-employees to buy Microsoft’s software, hardware, books and other products at a crazily discounted price. I bought a book on security entitled “Assessing Network Security” which should be an interesting read (I think I’ll place it alongside books such as Hacking Exposed and WI-FOO once I’m done with it). I also bought a copy of Flight Simulator X (PC), Halo (PC) and Windows Vista Ultimate simply because they were going for such cheap prices. I know someone will be pleased when they receive a present worth £350 (approx. $700) which actually cost me 6.5% of the retail price!

Wind-down

All in all, today has been a great day at Microsoft, as have all the others, and I do hope that I will meet some of the employees whom I recognise again sometime in the future and that I will visit Microsoft’s headquarters once more.

Oh, and I’m still a Linux user – come on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn