MGB rocked!
I spent the last week in Atlanta together with ~12000 other Microsoft employees at the yearly MGB. This was my first such event, and for me it was a real wild ride. The people who coined the term “drinking out of a firehose” knew what they were talking about; it will take weeks to digest everything we saw.
A random sampling of cool experiences, in no particular order:
- Having a Senior VP pass by and randomly hi-five me during the Smashmouth concert at the MGB party.
- Talking briefly with Rebecca Dias after one of the WSE 2.0 sessions. She is really, really smart. Scary smart.
- SteveB. enough said :)
- The facts slide from the closing keynote- 25,000 bananas and almost half a million soft drinks consumed, 65000 powerpoint slides and 6 TB of VMs shown, 9 miles of carpeting, 12 miles of wiring. (hopefully I'm not mixing up any of the numbers)
- Seeing a presenter fire up a version of Powerpoint 2003 which he compiled to managed code and enhanced with some cool winform capabilities - 'just to show how easy managed C++ is in Whidbey'. Talk about cool demos....
- Meeting lots of old friends from Microsoft Israel whom I hadn't seen in over a year.
- Meetings lots of new friends from all over the country (and the world)
Out of the 12000 attendees, everyone single person I spoke with was both highly intelligent and extremely friendly. The energy and focus in this company is unique, and I'm glad to be a part of it. And I pity our competitors, it seems almost unfair to have so many good people in one place :)
