Closing Time At Microsoft's Campus Pub 393
theodp writes "Just three days before the Spitfire pub was to open on Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division campus, TechFlash reports that Microsoft got cold feet and pulled the plug on the project, leaving the bar's owner and his 22 employees in the lurch. 'I am completely stunned and disappointed by the decision,' said now lease-less owner Jonathan Sposato, who's stuck with space built out as a pub, complete with a giant bar, a fireplace, and eight beer taps. (He says it wouldn't be economically viable to refit it as a restaurant.) Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed the company's sudden change of heart: 'The goal was always to create a cool gathering place for employees, but to do so in a manner that's consistent with a business environment. We decided we should do something more appropriate, and that meant not having a pub.' The new pub had been in development for more than a year."
Sad reality (Score:5, Interesting)
The unspoken reality at Microsoft is that there is a large minority of Mormons working in and around Microsoft. While something like caffeinated drinks can be overlooked, something as potent and mind-altering as alcohol is a spit in the face of the Mormon employees.
There is no doubt that some pressure was brought to bear against management when this pub was announced, and though it hasn't been publicized, the Washington state Mormon leaders have been visiting the campus to lobby against the pub.
It sucks for the people who own and work at the pub, but in a silently ultra-religious state like WA, it's no surprise that on of the largest local employers bows to the commands of the puppet masters.
Re:Bars are a business and a meeting place (Score:5, Interesting)
No this is AMERICA....
Whereas in Europe you can head over to a pub to relax and chit chat, in AMERICA (and English Canada) it is completely frowned upon.
I know whenever I am stateside and I order a beer I am completely out of the norm!
BUT yet when it comes to drinking while I sip my beer the others get piss drunk, do idiotic things, and generally make a complete a** out of themselves.
This begs the question, is the pub the problem? Or the fact that the culture in this respect has its head up its a**.
BTW I am European, grew up in North America, but now have been living in Europe for 15 years. And while Europeans have their oddities, this aspect of English North American life is really screwed...
Re:Sad reality (Score:5, Interesting)
It sucks for the people who own and work at the pub, but in a silently ultra-religious state like WA, it's no surprise that on of the largest local employers bows to the commands of the puppet masters.
Yeah right, puppet masters? What kind of conspiracy are you trying to push around here? A quick search around the net shows only about 3% of Washingtonians are Mormons [adherents.com]. You really think the Mormons can push Microsoft around? I'd like to see some real evidence of that. For what it's worth (probably not much) you can be alcohol in gas stations and grocery stores even in Utah.
No, this is another case of someone getting screwed out of a partnership with Microsoft. They weren't the first, they won't be the last. If you go into a partnership in any way with Microsoft, make sure you have the contract nailed down, and nothing is left to trust. Because if they can get an extra dollar from screwing you over, they will. You may say this is flamebait, but it is true: there is a long list of companies who have gone down because of underestimating the dangers of doing business with Microsoft.
Corporate Stupid in a Nutshell (Score:5, Interesting)
Boy if this isn't Office Space and every boneheaded corporate move ever in a nutshell. Hey let's do something nice for out employees, they're adults who will enjoy this and can have a beer without getting completely drunk and making asses of themselves at work (or we'll fire them, that's fair). Then a lawyer takes a look at it, says you know this looks like it might be fun and actionable, and god knows we don't have any money - better cancel it.
So you end up five times worse than never even having planned it in the first place, because you got everyone's hopes up and now you look like stupid jackasses. But your asses are covered, so all is right with the world! And this is why we pay all you stupid CEOs and MBAs the big bucks, to be dithering asswipes who lead by windsock.
Boring (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sad reality (Score:1, Interesting)
yes actually all of the above would. start talkin.
Re:Sad reality (Score:1, Interesting)
These are the two visits I have specific knowledge of. Outside of these, I only know that there were other meetings to which I was not privy to.
2008/10/15 - Mormon leadership group (including former LDS of Seattle President Gordon Conger and Todd Knowles) met with the Lisa Brummel and Mike Murray to discuss the planned pub.
2008/3/25 - Mormon leadership group (including previously mention Todd Knowles) met with Lisa Brummel (and staff) and Jon Sposato for a hearing of Sposato's response to the group's fight against the pub.
Again, these are only the meetings I am aware of.
Anon.
Re:Bars are a business and a meeting place (Score:4, Interesting)
My boss got fired after he walked past his secretary and she smelled alcohol on his breath and reported that as sexual harassment. From beer. His friends took him out for his birthday during lunch.
The company didn't want to chance it. So welcome to America. Home of the free (to sue for every stupid little thing).
Perhaps this was what MS thought about. Personally, I think America has a relationship with alcohol that's beyond fucked up. Ever notice how the bars in some states (I hesitate to say all) have no windows/small windows and then with the shades pulled down? Welcome to the land where the Puritans settled. And no, those attitudes never went away completely.
Re:Sad reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe "puppetmasters" was a bit strongly phrased, but there is no secret here. I don't have any specific information because I do not work for MS. I only know people who do and I don't want to pose any risk to them for telling me what they know.
This, like many things that go on behind closed doors, is simply not apparent because it hasn't been publicized. Now, if you ask me to vouch for what I've been told, then we're at a standstill, because I can only tell you that I believe them because I don't have any reason not to.
Re:Bars are a business and a meeting place (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I think its a bad move on Microsofts part... (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the nastiest bits of code that I wrote after a four rather strong beer lunch. It was in the early days of graphics when we had a DEC VT11, vector graphic display where we had to draw the screen within the phosphor decay time so it didn't flicker. Typically you would have a sequence of instructions for the graphic controller and then you interrupted the CPU which would do cleverer things. The problem was that every cycle spend in the interrupt code, the phosphor was decaying and it limited the number of things we could draw as the CPU was involved every time we drew a new component on the screen.
In the pub, I just thought "Sod it" and shaved a few cycles by having self modifying code. Ugly as hell and hard to maintain but it meant we could display more on the screen.
Microsoft has an "Australia" problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Time was when England exiled their most violent felons to an island continent penal colony half a world away. Over time the definition for "violent felon" slid from rapist and murderer to pirate, then to treasonous conspirator, and so on until they landed at political dissident. For many years they exported these folk, only to discover later that this was their best and brightest; their free thinkers, their engineers artists and inventors, the folk who were brighter than their superiors. And what were left were Lords and serfs.
So now Australia breeds a more vital breed of men, having been selected from that filter, and England has lost control of them.
Such is as it is with Microsoft. Microsoft has bought into the theory that the top 20% of workers contribute 80% of the work that they've lost sight of how fungible those metrics are. Their 20%ers are folk who threaten the established structure, who are smarter than their bosses, who have scary ideas. It's only right that they migrate from there to Google. Google is Microsoft's Australia.
And no, I've never worked for Microsoft or Google and I still don't and I doubt that I would barring dire circumstance or rude incentive.
Memories of Tivoli Beer Bashes past (Score:2, Interesting)
I moved from Santa Cruz, California to Austin, Texas to work for Tivoli Systems, which had just become a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM. Tivoli's systems management product TME10 was a perfect match for IBM; with its support for (then) some 42 different flavors of UNIX as well as Windows NT and its megalithic, CORBA-based architecture it was certainly baroque enough a pairing to satisfy any Blue-Suited loyalist. In every other way, however, the Tivoli culture was completely foreign to IBM's operations in the states.
Talking about IBM as if it were a single entity and could be characterized as such is, of course, utter stupidity. I haven't had an update in a while, but if you work on campus in Austin (I didn't, but I visited sometimes to loot the surplus barn) it's all very stodgy, or so I was told by some Tivolites who had repeated occasion to visit its hallowed halls and not simply its rearmost loading dock. (Insert jokes here.) But if you worked for Tivoli then the atmosphere was more than a little relaxed.
While books could be written about the experience of working for a support organization staffed almost entirely by former systems administrators, which while I was there "gained" its "Level 1" front-line support staff which would leave gems in case logs like "dragon drop" and "yowzij" (I'll let you figure out what word that's supposed to be -- suffice to say it was written phonetically) the currently relevant differentiating factor was the Beer Bash. Every Friday the company would knock off a little early and crack open a good number of beers, provided by the company, and stand around in the courtyard shooting the proverbial shit (no firearms involved.)
I don't know if the Beer Bash still survives in any form; by the time I had left the support organization had moved into a satellite site and adopted its own mini-bash, with upgraded appetizers as consolation for exile. To be fair, the main office was within easy walking distance in an office park immediately adjacent to the Arboretum shopping plaza. Most excellent for me, my apartment was approximately equidistant to both, so I could stroll home with ease. But I can tell you that even with the immense (sometimes literally) and diverse cast of interesting characters who worked for Tivoli that the scene was always affable.
Back to the subject of IBM -- while working for Tivoli I also learned that if you worked for IBM consulting in the UK, the two-pint luncheon was pretty much The Way Things Are Done. And by two I mean minimum. They never did send me anywhere, though. They had much more personable individuals for that purpose :)
Alcohol "causing" crime (Score:1, Interesting)
Alcohol probably does not cause crime; however, alcohol is an idiot magnet. If I could, I'd live in a dry county. It drives away the people who need to have intoxicants to survive. (I'm "high on life," yes, please call me a fag in email so as not to waste valuable discussion space.)
Think about the magnets for idiots that exists near your neighborhood. The same people who cannot plan ahead more than 24 hours in their lives are the people who, when presented with an opportunity where crime is profitable, impulsively do it. Wal-marts, liquor stores, pawn shops, convenience stores, tattoo parlors, etc. draw these people like moths to light, and that's why many communities have chosen to ban these businesses.
In chaos theory, instant gratification businesses are a "chaotic attractor" that draw in chaotic people ;)
Re:Microsoft has an "Australia" problem (Score:2, Interesting)
You're right. That was rude and worse, unoriginal. Here, let me offer some helpful well known tips that escaped you, the managers you supervise, and the folks under them:
The network is untrusted. Install with no open ports by default - servers and desktops both. No listening services! Let the customers select the whiz-bang features they want. They still will but then it won't be all your fault when they join a botnet. This is best practice, what, 25 years now?
Mounted media are untrusted. Autorun and its ilk are the spawn of the devil. These also should be disabled by default. The control that enables it should have a "You look like you're trying to install a virus" wizard. And if for some godforsaken reason you won't disable the damned thing but choose instead to post instructions on how to disable it manually and through policy, make sure they frimping work flawlessly every time!.
If you're going to rewrite the network stack, testing should be very thorough. Rate limiting the network because audio is playing is just unforgivable.
If your OS won't run well on a 1.6GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM, we get to call it a pig that won't fly. Not that you're going to avoid that anyway, but at least it will be less fair. The market turned. No longer is "Moore Giveth, Microsoft taketh away" an acceptable answer. "Run well" does not mean "Show a desktop". It means "Do useful stuff like browse the Internet, play videos and edit documents."
My personal favorite peeve: If you're going to put "Add/Remove Programs" in every user's control panel, the damned thing should "Add Programs" with the default settings. This is a minor nit. I don't know why it bothers me so. Maybe I should get therapy. Still, you should see what other folks are doing [apt] to contrast with your own efforts in the software installation arena.
For every feature you add hire a guy and make it his life's mission to exploit it to the detriment of the end user. In fact go ahead and get yourself a battalion of those folks in advance. You need them. If you already have them, then fire them all and get new ones because the ones you have aren't gettin' 'er done. In fact, have HR actively recruit people who make fun of your stupid ideas and have one in every meeting. Nothing deters an idiot so much as open laughter. You definitely need people who are able to get a good belly laugh out of something ridiculous like Universal PnP.
If you're going to try and push your own deployment tools they should be no harder to install than Clonezilla, have more features than DRBL and run on XP and later. There's no excuse for the state of your OS deployment tools. They're worse than none at all. Do you not know that when you put out a package like that some large organizations make it a holy mission to make them work no matter how bad they are? Have a heart for the poor sods who get tasked to use this stuff and don't let them out until they're credible.
If you have Windows Server you should be able to PXE Boot to a thin desktop over the network from any PXE enabled PC. See the LTSP project for how this is done. Yeah, I know... you're not in servers.
Really you could fix all these things and I'd still not be interested in your products but at least the poor souls that must use them would have a little less of a horrid time. And I would get less spam. That's a benefit, right? Actually W7 isn't too horrid yet. We'll see how badly you munge it in the released copy. I expect to have a good laugh. In a recent survey 83% of IT pros say they've got no intention of even trying to deploy it for the first year. You lost that much credibility with Vista. You probably don't have too many more shots at this.
And if you're in patch-and-fix... if MS fixed the above stuff they could get away with patches once a month. As it is you should be streaming the damned things in real time.
You may use this post in any way you wish. I release it to the public domain.