Today was a very fun and
informational day as we had our meetings with Microsoft during the day and our
group dinner at night.
Our meeting at Microsoft gave us
insights into the future according to Microsoft (although I’m not allowed to
talk about what we saw in detail) and also into the present situation and
workings of the company. The first stop
of the day was to the “Envisioning Center” where we got to see how Microsoft
saw the world in 5-10 years with their products of course at the center of
everyone’s technological ecosystem. Like
I said earlier, we’re not allowed to say exactly what we saw but I can say that
we saw their vision for work, on-the-go, and home and it was all a very
synchronized and personalized environment which was very interesting and
inspiring to see. Although all of the technology
and demonstrations that were shown to us were cool and innovative, it seemed a
bit scripted and unreal at points, and it assumed that everyone would firstly
be using this new smart technology, and that it would all be assumedly Microsoft’s
technology rather than another company’s or mix of many which I thought was a
bit unreal and overly optimistic. All in
all it was very thought provoking to see Microsoft’s ideas for future
technology and definitely got me thinking of things that I would create or want
to buy.
The next part of our meeting was in
a conference room in another building where we met with someone in the Product
Evangelist department for mobile development, which basically meant that he
went to various up and coming app developers and tried to sell them to make
their app for the windows phone. Our
meeting here was very frank, as he explained flat out that Microsoft had messed
up in the past and lost its edge in mobile development to the point now where
they have an incredibly small market share.
He also talked to us about the culture of Microsoft and how it has
changed over the years. He explained that
when the company was still smaller, the culture was very competitive in that if
two people had different ideas for the same problem the response was that one
idea “won” and the other “lost” and the losing idea had to deal with it and
move on. However after Bill Gates left
the culture became more collaborative and the company lost its cutting edge
according to him. Despite this he was
optimistic about Microsoft’s future and talked about their commitment to “service
and devices” rather than just selling software licensing fees
One topic that I found particularly
interesting was a conversation our group had between meetings about the
valuation of companies with either no current revenue stream (like Snapchat) or
ones that make little or no profit (Amazon).
This made me think about how often Wall Street values companies
sometimes entirely off the possibility of future revenues as predicted by one
or a few investors who more often than not have little or no concrete proof of
their prediction. It also reminded me of
a quote from Jeff Bezos the founder and CEO of Amazon who was asked by
interviewer if he even knew how to spell the word “profit” because his company
has failed to make a steady profit to which Bezos replied of course he could, p-r-o-p-h-e-t.
After our meeting with Microsoft
(we talked with another gentleman who worked in Microsoft Research, but he
mainly spoke about advanced networking topics which went mostly right over my
head) we all went out to a very nice seafood dinner courtesy of our trip leader
Brad Miller. It was a great night with
wonderful food and an awesome group of people which was a perfect way to wrap
up our day.
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