The Microsoft company meeting was held this past Thursday, 21-SEP-06. At Safeco Field. For those of you who are not familiar with baseball, Safeco Field is the home stadium for the Seattle Mariners. In other words, it probably holds 40-50,000 people. Now, we didn’t take up the entire stadium. A lot of longtime employees pass on attending the company meeting because they’ve seen it before and have too much 
work to do. But it’s strongly recommended that you attend your first year at Microsoft, and as you can see from the photo above right, a lot of people did show up.
Something was conspicuously absent at the company meeting, however. No, it wasn’t Bill Gates (that’s him on the big screen in the photo to the right). Even though he is retiring in a year or so, he gave a keynote covering some of the fascinating things that Microsoft Research is working on.
What was missing were laptop computers, which to me seem surgically attached to the vast majority of Microsoft employees. For example, at the first Visual Basic product team meeting I attended, only two people out of a dozen had not brought their laptops. I was one of the two people.
What made Microsoft employees leave their laptops at home was security: when Bill and Steve are around, it means no laptops, no cameras, and no bags.
[I actually wanted to bring my laptop. I was behind on my marketing plan, and the first draft was due to my boss the next day.]
Most of the company meeting was just a dog and pony show. Mind you, the dogs and ponies were bloody impressive–we got to see the best Microsoft has to offer–but there was still a big focus on features rather than benefits.
The thing that really surprised me, though, was that my cynicism was beaten down, at least for long enough that I drank some of the Kool-Aid being served. Part of it was just being a part of it. 20,000 people were in Safeco Field with me, all Microsoft employees just like me.
The other part of it was realizing that, as a user-focused company (as opposed to a datacenter-focused company like Oracle), Microsoft was changing parts of the world (albeit small parts). There was this incredibly sappy promotional video shown during the first keynote about a school in rural China to which Microsoft had donated computers and software. Watching it felt like reading George Antonious’ The Arab Awakening (published 1939), a deeply biased work of Arab nationalism that is nonetheless profoundly persuasive and managed to push my college self down the road of caring deeply about the Middle East–in spite of my general skepticism and resistance to manipulation. In other words, I knew I was being manipulated by this video, but I couldn’t help but be touched. The video included a high school girl who was brought to tears when trying to explain how much Microsoft’s contribution to her school meant to her and her future. Of course, this is a company with a ridiculous amount of money, so they couldn’t just leave it at that. After the video, they brought the school superintendent, the student and her mother up on stage. Microsoft had flown them in just for this event.
I was in a baseball stadium, and I could just imagine the hawker walking down the aisle, calling out "Kool-Aid, get your Kool-Aid!" I raised my hand to this imaginary vendor, passed him a few bucks, and happily drank my Kool-Aid down.