Microsoft Visit

A visit to the Big M, a company which makes so much money that it often has a $ in its name.

One of the major problems about Microsoft is its image. When you are a monopoly, in more than one way you receive negative publicity, and one of the best ways to annul that is to put in efforts to awe your customers (or your future employees). It is one thing I have to unashamedly admit, Microsoft does amazingly well.

I visited the Microsoft Support Centre in Bangalore the week before last (28th of July) along with my classmates at my college and we received a whirlwind tour of the premises. It started off with a presentation at an amazing audio-visual room, which quickly progressed (more because of the people skills of the Microsoft staff than our acumen) to an interesting question-answer session, and during which the team showed off their marvelous workstations and net connectivity, answered our questions about the Linux threat, showed us a sizzling Longhorn preview video, and generally bowled us off the earth with descriptions about their product services labs. That part of the evening which lasted for about three to four hours was the most exciting, and despite hunger pangs, it was a truly refreshing talk with people who actually knew some things and who were excited about new things at hand.

Soon after that we got a tour of the building. Conference rooms being named after rivers, an office-space without separated cubicles, an amazing Product Support and Services (PSS) Lab (I saw my first rack of servers there), and entertainment rooms filled with everything from a pool table to free snacks; yummy!

It was a short visit, but so sweet, and one thing that I was amazed by was the sheer approachability of our contacts. They knew that Microsoft software had problems and they were willing to admit that, they were willing to provide a live demo about anything that we asked, and explanations about how the Support Centre worked were lucid and interesting; if there was one complaint that I had about Microsoft is that (unlike Google) they were missing the human element. The recent growth spurt of Microsoft blogs on the net had stemmed that somewhat, but there is nothing better than hands-on experience.

Our thanks goes out to Mr. Santosh Kutty (who is an alumni of our college) who made this whole visit possible. We'll never forget the difference between arrogance and arrogance [inside joke that ;-)]