company meeting
Company Meeting - What a huge contrast from last year’s company meeting. Last year was dark and gloomy, and everyone was feeling pretty battered. This year, the roof of Safeco field was open, the sky was blue, and you could feel a pleasant breeze. Before the meeting, dancing jellyfish on windows media and employees playing catch with various football-like toys provided ambiance. Throughout the meeting, we were impressed with the engineering talents of employees making and launching paper airplanes from all around the stadium. No kidding, some of these paper airplanes were incredibly clever — I am envious of the skills that were demonstrated. Rick Beluzzo gave us the numbers and business plan spiel, and we got to see some first-time demonstrations of some of the new stuff being cooked up in various groups. Windows XP and Office XP were big hits at the meeting, but XBox was the biggest hit. The last two speakers were Bill and Steve. Bill looked far more relaxed and healthy than the last few events I’ve seen him do, and the speech was surprisingly well delivered. One underlying theme was one that pops up all the time in his talks — “people are still underestimating the potential of software”. This year, the vision was much clearer. It has been a couple of years since we switched from “a PC on every desk” to the amorphous and imprecise “empower people with great software anytime anywhere on any device” (or something like that). That was a pretty terrible vision statement, IMO — it’s as if someone said “Hey, now that we have got PCs put everywhere, exactly what business are we in?” and the response was “Our vision is to do anything”. The vision statement hasn’t been changed, but the vision as communicated has become much more crisp and precise. Bill also showed a sort of sappy satire video demonstrating how he and Steve are such good friends. This might have been a sort of response to speculation about Steve “kicking out” Bill or theories of a “Bill vs. Steve” culture in Microsoft that have recently enjoyed a little popularity due to David Bank’s book. It’s kind of hard to read Bank’s book to imply a rift between those two, and it is a rather ludicrous idea to anyone observing from the inside, but it’s still conceivable that this was a “just in case” to make things perfectly clear. Or maybe it was just a funny video… Steve Ballmer opened his presentation by saying “I’m your monkey boy”, giving props to the video of him jumping around that someone let loose on the Internet. And he did not disappoint. This year, he screamed and jumped and ran around with more energy than ever, and he didn’t get nearly as winded as last year. Steve always gives 110% of the credit to everyone but himself, and this year he gave an impressively sincere thanks to everyone for working so hard last year. And when it came to pumping people up, he made everyone in that place remember exactly why we do what we do. Yeah, I’m biased, but this company “kicks a part of the anatomy” (quoting Steve).