Day 3 - Microsoft

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.