A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab (2006) | Hacker News Reader

A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab (2006)

davidweiss.blogspot.com

207 pointsingve34 comments

If I recall correctly this was ground level of building 115, now renamed Studio G. Someone from Mac BU cruising the halls on a Razor scooter while wearing a propellor beanie once gave me a peek in that lab.

In Redmond?

I seem to remember MacBU was in San Jose, maybe that was before this post? Or were things split between the locations?

Yes, Redmond. The lab in the post looks like Redmond but I'm not sure where else Mac BU was, as a Mac user I thought it was cool to see the lab but it wasn't related at all to my work.

I started working in MacBU about 3 years after the article. It was split between the two locations when I joined. (Outlook for Mac and PowerPoint were both in California.) These photos look like Building 115 to me, though I didn't go into this particular lab often. After this, the team moved to Building 31 and later Building 35, if I remember correctly.

One thing that was interesting about MacBU was that it was in a completely separate division from the rest of Office (i.e. Windows Office). That gave the team a really cool outsider vibe and the team had a really nice close-knit culture.

And now moved to the new Building 4

For a moment I thought the "free drinks" fridge had Surge in it, but that turns out to be some Seagram's product.

Man that rack full of Xserves and Xserve RAIDs still looks great. The whole lab is impressive.

Must've been fun times.

The only reason I periodically want a Windows PC is because Office is better on Windows than Mac… and gaming.

Whoever decided to nerf the Mac Office version, probably helped Microsoft make a few extra billion.

I really feel for whoever had to test all those printers

Microsoft never ever got the mad props it deserved for its extensive testing and compatibility work. I remember going through reviews where we had to fix bugs from our competitors to preserve compatibility for earlier versions of their own products that had taken shortcuts.

I’ve often wondered if part of the declining quality of its products is that those actions were simply never given the respect they deserved.

I read the "USB cart of death" post from Raymond, and I really respected them for that.

I'm sure there are many great engineers, minds and all-round nice people who work at Microsoft, but when the company does what it does and screws people over and over, the act of the whole shadows the acts of individuals. These acts (of Microsoft, the company) doesn't make them bad people, but makes respecting them as a whole a lot harder.

Very well put

*and printer lab

It hurts my heart so badly that when you read a post of such vintage the outward facing links are almost certainly all broken.

We've lost so much.

And that's why archive.org exists.

Yep, but it's missing a lot (feels like about half missing) and it's a fragile single point of failure that's constantly under threat (political, legal, economic, cyberattack).

Wondered about this one too.

Even the Library of Alexandria was destroyed at some point…

At several points, actshually.

There has never been a good time to let our guard down, but there's seldom been a worse one.

Don't be sad, here it is in all its glory: https://web.archive.org/web/20250109120355/http://davidweiss...

And make sure to consider donating to the Internet Archive if this made your heart slightly less achy today :)

The OP was referring to outbound URLs. Those are still broken.

For me they worked, you need to change the capture date when viewed within IA.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) can often recover those broken links from 2006-era blog posts, preserving at least some of what would otherwise be lost.

(2006)

lol they made a reference to Sanford and Son (“the big one”)

The author is likely referring to the potential for a Cascadia megaquake: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

This. The northwest has been talking about "the big one" for ages.

I was in SoDo for the Nisqually quake in 2001, that's still the biggest quake I've been in, and I've been in the Bay Area for over 20 years now.

Booooring

Don’t get me wrong, love the writeup… Ancient history now but perhaps less so in 2006.

But if I took pictures of my employers’ lab and posted on my personal blog, they might not be thrilled… And if I were to seek permission, they’d want it on the company website instead…

Blogging on personal blogs was somewhat condoned back then. There was a period when MS was really encouraging personal blogs and then they pulled back from this to focus on blogs hosted on their platform.

Channel 9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_9_(Microsoft)) was taking off and they were doing video all around their campus. It was a real look behind the curtain and probably an element of the foundation for their adoption of open source.

what harm was caused?

Like that time someone gave a tour of Twitter HQ on TikTok and it inadvertently exposed that they and their coworkers basically did nothing all day but drink cappuccinos and eat free company food.

You could tell these guys were genuinely thrilled they got free sugary drinks in 2006. That was considered a serious perk back then.

It was. I was a teenager in the northwest in the 90s, and remember how aspirational it was to work somewhere that gave employees that kind of latitude.

Of course they did, taking pictures of people doing work would be the specific concern that was raised in the comment above yours. So all you're going to get is a look at the company fridge.

Was wondering that. Most places I’ve worked have been an (unspoken in some places, explicitly in others) no phots of anything work related.

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