Microsoft Parties

Yesterday I attended the Server and Tools Business's All Hands meeting, which Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at. Before the meeting, they played a few funny video clips they had made. One parodied Star Wars, another all those house remodelling shows ("Server Room Makeover!"). Much coolness. After the meeting, we wandered around a giant room filled with Xboxen, basketball game things (almost certainly raided from various Microsoft break rooms), climbing walls, and a mechanical bull, along with the tons of free (as in beer) beer, pizza, garlic fries, candy, pretzels, soda, and popcorn.

From there, I went pretty much directly to Bill Gates' house for an intern party (he holds several of these barbeques in his lake-front backyard each year). More free food, and classier than the STB All Hands: salmon, chicken-on-a-stick, grilled veggies, salad, wine, and pie, among other things.

While I was sitting on the stairs eating my dinner, a friend happened to turn around and notice Bill walking down the stairs behind us. I ended up at the center of a crowd of interns asking Bill a bunch of questions. My dad should get a kick out of this: Bill Gates, very wealthy man as you know, Bob, was wearing shorts and mocassins to this hoedown/hootenanny. Bill seemed a surprisingly okay guy. House is a little on the ginormous side, but the grounds were beautifully vegetated and watery. He even has an indoor/outdoor pool that goes underneath an exterior wall of his house (and on the outside part, he has a flatscreen TV and embedded remote along the side of the pool; crazy!).

I didn't really chat with any of the other VPs present. I'm not very good at making random chitchat with people, especially when there are hierarchies involved. Not that Microsoft strongly enforces these hierarchies, mind, it's just a personal problem of mine. I blame it on my mother making me call all adults by "Mr." and "Mrs." when I was growing up. Yeah. Blame that. ;)

Categories: Microsoft, BillGates