Avatar

My Workterm at Microsoft and What I have Discovered About It’s Culture

Working at Microsoft Canada in Mississauga last work-term has taught me many lessons. Lessons that weren’t directly applicable to my job title at the time, but lessons on where I want to be in terms of my career and what I want to do. Also, my work-term showed me just how much I hate the corporate culture – the cubicle job, the many politics, the fake smiles on people’s faces and so much more. It really got to me midway through.

Now, instead of continuing on with my complaints (there are many) there are some good aspects to working at a big company, especially for a marketing position. For one, the larger the company, the bigger their spending on advertising. So, as someone interested in getting his foot in the door with marketing Microsoft was an ideal place for me. Or so I thought…

The thing with big corporations is that their culture has matured to the point of saturation. At some point in time, Microsoft’s culture became a staple. If you didn’t think like them, you weren’t hired or kept for long. A company’s culture is extremely important and Microsoft failed to create a sustainable culture.

Microsoft’s culture is pretty obvious. One can smell it in the air upon setting foot in their premises. Many programmers know it, and try to avoid it – bashing Microsoft’s brand in the progress. What is Microsoft’s culture? I’ll put it in 2 short sentences: Microsoft’s culture is aggressively business-oriented. It is dominated by old-fashioned behaviour along the very tall hierarchy chain. 

Microsoft’s culture is aggressively business-oriented.

Microsoft, a software development company (now branched into hardware development, as well), has non-technical staff in all positions. At Microsoft Canada, I would say most employees were non-technical. I don’t expect the marketing division to have programmers, but  they should at least hire people who understand where technology is heading and the current internet phenomenon. So many project managers didn’t understand what Twitter is, let alone how to use it. There were even senior staff who don’t know how to copy and paste, resulting in tons of wasted time just re-typing everything.

It is dominated by old-fashioned behaviour along the very tall hierarchy chain.

I found this incredibly interesting. A few weeks into my work-term, I was happy to hear that Microsoft had recently replaced its staff with younger employees. I was expecting the workplace to be buzzing. Instead, it was stiffling. Senior staff did all of the talking and decision-making when it was clear that they weren’t the experts. I felt this first-hand. In one of my team’s monthly meetings, the higher-ups were discussing Microsoft and Google’s position on the market. I had a few inputs on this since I update myself daily with both companies, and plus I follow tech-internet news. I decided to send an email to the entire team, including the director of my work division to discuss an article I had found online. It was entirely appropriate since a few days before the team was scratching their heads on how to proceed. I received no replies back. It was after my work-term ended that I had found out the higher-management found my email to be (and I quote): “Inappropriately written for communicating with senior staff.” I believe I’m pretty good at writing emails. In fact, I’ve received several compliments before. The issue with my email wasn’t that it sounded “rude” but rather it was coming from a lowly co-op student.

Another fascinating event was when I had written a similar email (but of a different topic) regarding one of the emails another director had written. I was respectively opposing her point by writing to other Microsoft co-ops to initiate a discussion. Instead of a discussion, one of the co-ops told me that the director was way up there and that I shouldn’t be questionning her decisions. I should accept that she knows best and leave it as that. There was so much backlash that I just had to continue the debate. It was too interesting to just let it die off. It was clear to me that these students would be hired as full-time employees at Microsoft and continue the downward spiral of the company. They understood so little about their industry, yet they will dedicate years of their lives to it. Instead of spending time to learn more, they reject any ideas except those proposed by their immediate bosses. This was a trend with full-time’s as well.

Man, I can keep going on and on but I’m just going to cut it short. Microsoft is a dinosaur kind of a company: Ancient, big and slow.

Does the pride of a successful company always take over it’s culture? Is this the precursor to a lack of innovation that so many big firms face? As always, let me know what you think.

To cap it off, this is a print-out I scanned:

But Microsoft employees DO use Google Maps!

I had printed this off and someone at the printer picked it up and wrote a note. Funny thing is…everyone at Microsoft uses Google, they just don’t admit it infront of their bosses.

- Peter Kao

HOWTO: Configure Microsoft Exchange and Outlook Web Access for Thunderbird

PLEASE READ:

If you have a problem with the add-on, please contact the guys over at http://groups.google.com/group/thunderbird-webmail-extension They will be able to help you more than I can. They’re the developers of this add-on.

Microsoft has an amazing way of wasting my time. See Microsoft Atlas Cheats on Online Reach Prediction Research Paper and Wow, My Windows Vista Self-Destructed.

It took me a full hour to configure my Microsoft Exchange/OWA email account for Thunderbird and lucky for you I wrote a set of easy instructions for you to follow!

1) First download the WebMail Thunderbird add-on (ex. Web-Mail-x.x.x) which will help you connect your Thunderbird to your web-based email accounts (ex. Gmail)

Note: If you’re new to installing add-on’s for Thunderbird, simply right-click the link that leads to the add-on and select “Save Link As…” Then, go to Tools in Thunderbird followed by a visit to Add-Ons, then to Install on the bottom.

2) After installing it, you’ll need an add-on for the add-on. Sounds funny doesn’t it? You can download it here. There will be a list of add-on’s that you can choose from (there’s even one for Gmail), but for our purposes download and install the file that starts with ‘owa’. The installation should be the same as for any Thunderbird add-on. This time, you will need to restart your Thunderbird for the add-on’s to initiate.

3) We now need to configure the Webmail add-on’s add-on. Go to Tools -> Add-ons, select Webmail-OWA and click Options. Visit the Domains tab and click Add.

In the Domain field, enter whatever follows at the end of the @ symbol of your email address (ex. gmail.com)

In the URI field, enter the URI of the Outlook Web Access address (ex. http://www.yourwebsite.com/exchange or http://mail.yourwebsite.com)

4) Now you’re ready to start creating your account (Tools -> Account Settings -> Add Account) . When presented with the new window, select Webmail as the account type and set youremail@yourwebsite.com as the Incoming User Name. Hit Finish when you’re done.

5) Go back to the Webmail add-on’s add-on option screen (Tools -> Add-ons, select Webmail-OWA and click Options) and now access the Accounts tab. If you had set up everything correctly in the step above, you should see your recently created account. There are additional settings there that might need tinkering and depending on how your Microsoft Exchange was set up you might not need to change anything at all. If your account can’t connect to the server, then just come back and select some of the options. Unfortunately, trial-and-error is the only way here.

6) At this point, you should be able to read emails. In order to write emails, go to Account Settings again (Tools -> Account Setting) and click Outgoing Server (SMTP). On the top right-side, hit Add…

In the Description field: Enter the name that will describe this account. (ex. Gmail Account)

In the Server Name field: Enter ‘localhost’

Port should be set to the default of ’25′

Check the User name and password box, and type in your User Name in full (ex. youremail@yourwebsite.com)

Leave the rest alone and hit OK.

7) Last step! With the Account Settings window still open. Click on your Web Mail account and in the Outgoing Server (SMTP) drop-down, select the description name you provided in the step above and voila! You’re done!

A little bit complicated if you ask me, but it’s all worth it. You can now use Microsoft Exchange or your Outlook Web Access account on Thunderbird!

How’s that for my first tutorial?

Peter Kao

Microsoft Atlas Cheats on Online Reach Prediction Research Paper

This makes me really mad. Microsoft has done it again. Over and over again they prove to be deceitful, which just shows that they are a company without any sense of moral value. I can’t believe that the world’s largest and most influential company can be so evil. Okay fine – evil might be an overstatement, but I really hate how they conduct business.

I was reading a research paper produced by the Atlas Institute from Microsoft. They are part of Atlas - the advertising section of Microsoft that produces research data to help advertisers [convert into paying-suckers for Microsoft's overvalued products]. The purpose of the research is to show how the Atlas platform is able to more closely predict actual reach with projected reach. They even had the balls to put this up on the first page of the paper:

Atlas lies in research paper

So what was in the research paper that made me so mad? This…

Atlas graph cheats

At first glance, it looks like any digestible graph, however, upon further inspection one can see that the axises (Actual Reach) and (Predicted Reach) do not start with the same distances from the origin. In fact, the bottom axis (Actual Reach) starts slightly to the right of the graph. This would be okay if you were comparing two completely different kinds of values such as time with temperature, but we are talking about the same kinds of numbers here – we’re talking about the number of audiences. To make matters worse, the scale is on a log10 scale! That means the increments in the axis increase logarithmically (with base 10)! A slight shift in the graph would mean HUGE inaccuracies in the graph.

Before I go any further, note that the closer the samples (presented as dots) are to the solid line, the more accurate the prediction reach is to the actual reach. Microsoft has skewed the solid line so that it better matches with the actual numbers!

So, I took the liberty to fix the graph a bit so that the line looks like how it’s suppose to look like:

Atlas graph cheats LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE

The blue line that I have drawn is the actual line. The closer the dots are to the line, the more accurate the data is. At the bottom in green, I separated the increment of 10 million into smaller increments of 800,000 to show how off Microsoft was in their mistake.

They were approximately off by 800,000 to 1,500,000 audiences! That’s a huge difference.

Screw you Microsoft. I’m not going to use your stupid-ass Atlas product.

Note: I’m sure that this mistake has gone unnoticed for most executives/managers. Not everyone has the time to look at the graph carefully. And that’s exactly what Microsoft counts on…

- Peter Kao

,

My Favorite Sites

May these links be a guide to web enlightenment. Schwing!

  • Trendwatching