An interesting view inside Google as a workplace has surfaced on the net. This could be either a look at the actual reality of Google or just a desperate attempt by Microsoft HR to boost employee morales and keep its employees within the fortress that is Redmond. Either that or a prankster who hates both companies just as much.

The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek.

An anonymous Microsoft employee has posted on a fresh WordPress.com blog of what appears to be the full contents of an email circulating Microsoft’s internal mailing lists. Patriotically enough, he or she wanted to share this with the rest of the world just to show what a great workplace Microsoft is and Google is not.

The original email appears to be an interview with an ex-Microsoft employee who left Microsoft for his own startup, only to be later acquired by Google, which he then left to join Microsoft again. Confusing – and slightly ironic. The interviewee answers a series of questions highlighting some of the biggest HR issues such as work environment, career development and work benefits.

The email suggests Microsoft should look into some of Google’s stronger points and adopt them to be more competitive, though as it mentions, this culture is based around a very immature company – most of the employees being in their 20’s – and that it is, in many ways, more like a college campus than a professional business. The shiniest of the stars in all this may just be the free food. Until the Google Fifteen strikes at you.

The interview offers a lot of interesting facts and views (and maybe fiction as well), but since I myself don’t work at Google – nor know anyone that does – I can’t claim any of this is true or false. At any rate, this interview could probably be useful info for most people who work in the IT business on how they could improve their own workplace, so read up and be the judge of it yourself.

Please note: Since Long really isn’t well, I have been given both the great privilege and dubious honor of replacing him. This post is based on a draft he had for it. (Yes, Long has an editor – can you believe it?.) – Oscar

Update: The original interviewee, Geoffrey has voiced his own opinions on the ‘leak’ of his email at his own blog. He insists the views and opinions of Google are of his own, and if you draw even a nano-sized connection between him and Microsoft he will punish you to hell.

I personally think if there is anyone to ‘blame’ for any problems that arise from this matter should be the human resource staff who shared this email in the first place and not the final Microsoft employee who posted it on the internet. I think it’s common sense when something is spread around internally as wildly as this was it will eventually surface. The HR person had the responsibility to keep the details of his interview private and confidential. The anonymous employee only published it because he was proud of his workplace, nothing wrong with that.

I’ve been stricken sick (and still am) for the past few days so unfortunately I had to miss out on some great blogging and also the Microsoft ReMIX event in Melbourne. However lying on the bed for 2 days straight did buy me some time to come up with a few foolproof plans to annihilate the blogosphere, but more on that another day.

Microsoft’s Channel9 recently interviewed one of the user-experience people I’m keeping an eye on, Julie Larson-Green, who is taking over some of the roles Tjeerd Hoek had left behind. Having just completed the redesign efforts for the 2007 release of Office, where she’s been for the last 10 years, she moved to Windows just before each of the products were released to manufacturing.

Back then, it wasn’t quite clear why all the Office people were rushing into Windows, but after all the Windows people began jumping out of the Windows group, obviously they’re here to run the show now.

As corporate vice president of program management for the Windows Experience at Microsoft, Julie Larson-Green oversees the design for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Her responsibilities include the end-user interaction design and overall experience for the Windows products after the release of Windows Vista, which will be available in 2007.

In her 30-minute interview with Channel9’s Charles and a woman I fail to recognize, there’s a lot of good information for every die-hard Windows-UX enthusiast. Whilst she doesn’t give any hints on what the design will focus on or anything related to design for that matter, she does talk a lot about their ‘new’ philosophy and process which is different to the past. Here are a few summary facts I found interesting.

• She’s worked in Windows for 6 months already.
• She reports to Jesus (Steve Sinofsky).
• They’ll try to change the Windows-organization to focus less on individual teams and more about Windows as one. Trying to drive cross-team collaboration, something that’s more familiar to the Office organization.
• They’re going to figure out what they’re going to do before doing it.
• Before starting to talk about what they’re doing they’re going to make sure they’re actually going to do it.
• New Office experience is not ‘done’. Still more changes to be realized.
• She started her Microsoft career in technical support, answering customer calls.
• They’re optimizing (the organization) for predictability – “innovate on a schedule”.
• Mentions Mary Jo Foley and her World War III article comparing Vista and Leopard.
• Believes there may have been too much transparency with Longhorn/Vista, and may have gotten itself into the problems it did.

By the looks of things, after all the reshuffling, things are still in order. But they’re going to try with all their might to prevent some of the problems that have plagued Longhorn.

What the Oscars or Cannes is for great movies, TED is for great ideas and great technologies. The latest presentation recording uploaded to TED Talks this week also happens to be a Microsoft one from March 2007. Stephen Lawler, general manager of the Virtual Earth team gave a sneak peek into what goes on behind the silk-screen doors at the labs.

Before you click play on the video below, I want to give you a heads up on the boring bits before you fall right asleep. Unfortunately for the first whole 2 minutes of the presentation, Stephen is in marketing-mode, explaining much of what we already know about Virtual Earth and common sense – more computing power, better experiences. If you’re short on time, you want to start at about 2:10, where it’s all ‘insider peeks’ from then on.

Where Stephen really kicks it up a notch is from 4:20, showing off how they translate images from a moving vehicle into 3D models without any user input whatsoever. Building 3D models with simply sequential photographs from a car, not lasers, not scanners, pure digital pixels is just mind-blowing. And not for the buildings on the side of the road, I can see models constructed way out into the distance.

What’s “cute view” you might ask? I’m sure the technical name is something much more professional, but it’s what I’m going to call it. Demoed at approximately 5:05, he loads up a video showcasing a new method of browsing Virtual Earth. It uses the same street imagery and 3D model data, but transforms it into a spherical view where the land is represented by a sphere and you are in the center. Buildings are shown as exaggerated objects that fly out into space. Kind of like those cartoons where a building is exaggerated so high, it extrudes out of the atmosphere and into space. A very fun and ‘cute’ alternative.

I’m not exactly sure what exactly is his last demo about, but it has to do with 3D models and the birds-eye imagery they have. From what I can understand, they can generate some neat composites that takes the best features of each and generates something much better looking.

It just goes to show Virtual Earth is not dead, and they still have plenty of tricks up its very long and PR-tight sleeve. Just by looking at the number of links on the left (local links on his own computer, I checked), there are still a lot of prototypes and demonstrations yet to be shown publically. Hopefully Stephen will speak again at another conference sooner than later and share some of those other internal nuggets.

A crapload of patents applications from Microsoft were processed today. There was one in particular that caught my attention, titled “Interactive job channel“. They say Microsoft has the brightest minds in the industry, and this is definite proof. These smart minds have combined two of life’s great necessities, finding a job and the television into one mind-boggling combination. Kiss your death MTV!

Anyway, I decided to dig deeper into this extraordinary invention, checking out some of their accompanied illustrations to find out how such a system would work and what it might look like. But I uncovered something more bizarre. Penguins roaming the city parks to be exact.

Could you imagine the conversation taken place between the patent inventors and illustration artist?

Inventor:	Hey.
Artist:	Hey. What do you need drawn?
Inventor:	Oh the usual. Just some office buildings would be good. Put a few trees in. Somewhere to sit, say a park bench or something. And some people.
Artist:	Screw you, I’m putting in penguins! Kickass.

Unfortunately neither an interactive job channel or street-roaming penguins has taken the world by storm. However when the time is right, I for one welcome our new fluffy overlords.

AMD’s recent high-velocity Phenom logo exhibition on the side of speeding Formula One helmet might have been a little anti-dramatic, if anything the size and fidelity of a 4 inch sticker was a little disappointing. However, thank god to the magic of Andre Fedosjeenko and Photoshop, in that order, he’s been able to recreate the AMD logo is (super) high resolution for all of us to appreciate the beauty of the blue comet or something or rather.

Can’t wait for AMD’s insightful PR team to tell us what it actually means, because some of us don’t get it.

Some of you might remember the post(s) I wrote last week about the movie “The Island”, in which I claimed the interactive touch desk in Dr. Merrick’s office was actually an early protoype of the Microsoft Surface. As it turns out, it was not a Microsoft Surface. When in fact, it was just good film making and the hard work by many talented designers. However, there is still a tiny Surface connection. Here is the explanation.

Yesterday, I had received an email from Mark Coleran about my blog post on the subject which provided a definite statement on whether or not in fact it was a “Surface”. For those of you not familiar with Mark’s work, he is an amazing visual designer for on-screen production. It is almost guaranteed you’ve seen some of his work in over a dozen movies including “The World is Not Enough“, “Lara Croft” and obviously “The Island“. Check out his showreel for an overview.

Mark carefully explains the story about Microsoft’s involvement in “The Island”.

Lots of companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Dell etc, regularly place product or branding within movies. In the majority of cases it helps offset the massive outlay required to equip scenes and can be very helpful in production. In the particular case of the Island, there were numerous companies involved. Microsoft were involved and the primary part of that involvement was for a information kiosk. I think they also had some background scene branding as well.

When companies get involved, they make a lot of suggestions about how and where, their products are featured. For the most part it is reasonable and sensible. They want to have their stuff seen in the best light possible. It is rare indeed if they get to have any creative involvement, and in this particular case, they did not.

The desk scene in The Island, was inspired in part by Minority Report. So much so they contracted the same science and technology advisor, John Underkoffler from M.I.T. to oversee the futurism. Mr Underkofflers’ involvement is ensure that what is done is believable in some sense, so makes suggestions based on what he is aware of in research.

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