A few weeks ago our small team helped to host Reuters on a visit to Microsoft campus here in Redmond.
We took Matt Cowan on what we sometimes call our “underground tour” – showing him spaces and places that few people, including employees, get to see. Matt was great to work with and had all the tough questions I would expect but also had an open mind to exploring what’s going on at Microsoft at the moment. It spans a broad landscape from operating systems on PC’s and phones, server operating systems in corporate datacenters and in the cloud, entertainment in the form of Xbox, Kinect and Zune, consumer cloud services such as SkyDrive and Hotmail, enterprise cloud services such as Office 365, search with Bing and fields of research such as natural user interfaces, somatic computing and human computer interaction. Oh and he got to meet with Jaron Lanier, father of virtual reality and visit the Microsoft Home, our Envisioning Lab and datacenter in the region.
I also had the chance to chat with Matt over a beer or two and savor the local Pike Place ale – I mentioned that I didn’t envy him the task of editing all the footage he had singlehandedly taken while with us. I think he did a pretty nice job of it though!
