My most recent visit to the campus was last week, when I was helping someone move. We had to go to the campus to get the directions to this place. After a few minutes, we were all told to look away, since there was some software on screen that we were not supposed to see. Being the vaporware junkie that I am, I looked. Because of a healthy (and probably well-founded) respect for Microsoft's lawyers, I will leave it at that. Oh well, I got a free soda out of the deal.
Last month, I was there to do a major presentation. This was for a program in school called "Employees for Tomorrow," which involved using Microsoft applications to do stuff that normally wouldn't be associated with high school students (and was way beyond the reach of any of the Macs that the schools so stubbornly insist is the only "real" computer.) Our group (one of eight from our school) worked on creating a curriculum to teach Excel to our class. As they have a tendency to do, Microsoft made a big deal out of the whole thing. Local dignitaries and media were invited. They were planning this to be a pretty big event.
It would be completely impossible for something this big to go off without a hitch.
The day before the presentation, there was a rehersal. They mentioned that there would be refreshments. We were expecting that there would be a couple of plates of cookies, some sodas (what else?)... At the time I forgot that Microsoft has their own catering service on campus. Ultimately, we discovered that the refreshments ended up more closely resembling those one would expect to find at a wedding than an exhibition. There was smoked salmon, shrimp cocktail, a large vegetable tray, and several other gourmet appetizers that I probably couldn't spell. Yet, it seems that no matter how much Microsoft shows off with the food they provided, soda was the beverage of choice! My guess is that somewhere, buried under their campus, a fifty-year supply of soda is stored in a bomb shelter (which has been built in case the industry gets so competitive that IBM, Apple, Corel or even the Federal Government ever orders airstrikes. If they were ever attacked, they could just break into the enemy computers and install Win95 on all of them. That would stop the enemy dead in it's tracks.)
Earlier I mentioned that it was impossible for an exhibition like this to go without a problem. It just happened that I got more than my share of the allotment of problems. Before the presentations began, the Microsoft representative stated that "In case anything goes wrong with the computers, remember that we are a software company." As I went up to the front and tried to load my PowerPoint presentation, Windows 95 crashed on me! Doing a presentation in front of 200 people, including several local dignitaries, has to be quite high on the "top ten worst places to have a system crash on you" list. Realizing I couldn't send everyone back to the buffet table (a solution used for a previous group,) I found myself having to ad-lib my way through a reboot (compounded by trying to run a rather slow NT login script) by joking about how unreliable computers can be at times, and how most system crashes I encounter are purely intentional. Somehow, I managed to survive through it all, and I completed my presentation. Of course, Microsoft was a software company, and that all problems would be hardware related. Hmmm... I wonder if the mouse was the problem?