Next week I'm headed to Redmond on business. This will be my first visit to Microsoft, and I have to admit that I am as giddy as a schoolgirl. For a nerd, this is the culmination of a lifelong dream. In my mind, I'm headed for a Utopian crystal city, where rivers of free soda flow freely and everyone zips around on Segways in between Xbox tournaments. This exalted vision of the Microsoft campus has been decades in the making...
My father went to work at IBM when I was five or six years old. Dad used to bring home reams of track fed, z-fold, "computer paper" that my sister and I used as blank coloring books. When we were a little older, he made us learn to read punch cards, and used them to assign household chores. Once or twice he snuck us into the office to play Adventure on a DAC mainframe terminal. You kids can have your Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War. No video game experience will ever be more exciting than reading the sentence, "You are in a maze of twisty passages all alike."
I got my first "personal computer" at age nine, a TRS-80. It had a cheap casette player as a disk drive. I want to say that it had something like 16K of RAM, but I can barely remember. I learned BASIC from a book and wrote a video game that involved shooting down space ships that scrolled across the amber colored monochrome screen.
I continued to be a computer enthusiast throughout high school. When it came time to pick a college and a field of study, my first choice was Computer Science. Sadly, the school guidance counselor steered me away from this unpromising "blue collar" field and I wound up pursuing a degree in Marketing instead.
But my early love of computing did ultimately take control of my professional destiny. Even as late as 1990, my mastery of DOS and BASIC were recognized as a very handy skill set.
The story of Bill Gates, the kid who stared down IBM and became the world's richest man selling lines of code was a captivating and inspiring story. I followed his career and his company with a passion.
Ultimately, it was my self taught skills with Visual Basic that were generously interpreted as sufficient qualification to join AOL in 1995. I spent my first couple of years there as a quasi-developer using AOL's proprietary development tool, form_edit.
My time at AOL marked a radical change in my feelings about Microsoft and Bill Gates. Suddenly, my childhood hero was the ultimate enemy. When Bill Gates called AOL "a dinosaur", we turned it into a rallying battle cry. When Bill allegedly told Steve Case, "I can buy part of you, or I can buy all of you", we redoubled our efforts to thwart MSN.
For several years we gave Microsoft a pretty good spanking, and it felt good. Still, we lived under the shadow of constant fear that Microsoft would eventually do us in. It seemed like no matter how many times we knocked them down, they kept getting up off the canvas to launch a new and more competitive product. Even a court ruling against Microsoft's monopolistic demolition of Netscape did not seem to slow them down. All of us came to respect Microsoft's long term committment to whatever business they decided to enter, whether it was online services, Web browsers, video games, etc. etc.
Coming to Bamboo, and embracing Microsoft as a partner and ally really did require a significant mind shift. It was so easy, and so fashionable to hate on Microsoft, turning that around did not happen overnight.
As I've increasingly had opportunities to work directly with people at Microsoft, the reverance and admiration has been restored. You can't help but be impressed by the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the average 'Softie, that I expected. What has really been a surprise is the generosity and kindness of the team at Microsoft. As an employee of a small ISV, I keep expecting Microsoft people to be dismissive or at least condescending. To date, everyone I have worked with has been nothing but supportive, accomodating and helpful. In part I know that the team at Bamboo earned the respect and support of Microsoft long before I got here. But it also seems to me that Microsoft has successfully created a nurturing culture around ISVs, partners and the developer community at large.
Anyway, I'm really excited to be going. I'm expecting to learn a lot as well as capture some new business opportunities. My name is Steve, and I am definitely a PC. And oh, by the way, this PC runs on SharePoint ;)
Posted
Apr 24 2009, 03:29 PM
by
Steve Gaitten
My name is Steve Gaitten, I am Director of Online Operations at Bamboo. My primary mission is to make Bamboo Nation the most useful SharePoint community site on the web. I am also focused on ensuring a world class shopping experience for customers who visit the Bamboo Solutions Online Store. Prior to Bamboo, I spent over a decade at America Online. At AOL my most recent roles included Director of Product Management in the Messaging & Social Media division as well as Managing Editor of AOL Money & Finance. I am a patented inventor, a bad golfer, an enthusiastic horticulturalist and a dog lover.