So Microsoft had a recruitment presentation on campus last night and I decided to head on over to see what it was all about. I figured, at the very least, I could win some software or an X-Box and (listening to Lao Tzu in the back of my mind) know my enemy slightly better.
Getting there I realized that it was going to be disgustingly hard to keep my (slight) bias hidden from view. The auditorium was packed with students, most of them drooling. The Archangel (as I referred to the woman who ran the presentation. she had some sinister looking red pants on.) had a casual attire and completely informal air about her. She started out by talking about how cool it was working for the largest software company in the world. "How many of you used a Microsoft product today? Raise your hand," she said. I think I was the only one with my arms still resting nicely on the arm rests of the chair I was in. She went on to talk about how MS Office grossed more money than the entire movie industry in 2002. "I just think that is really cool," she exclaimed. I had to turn to the kid next to me to ask him how much a copy of Office went for these days. He tells me that they are somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 per copy. I look back at him and say, "If I had to pay $200 for a piece of software I don't imagine I would have much money left for movies."
The one other moment when I almost vomited my last quad-espresso came when someone asked about Microsoft sponsoring visa's for foreign students who get a job there. Archangel responds with something about how they will help any employee of theirs get their citizenship and how they have a pretty good legal department (wink, wink to the audience.)
The presentation goes on for a while with some pretty uneventful Q&A between the Archangel and a summer intern they brought in. Eventually we get to the part where people start to get lively again, the prize raffle. On a table in the front of the room they have an X-Box with 2 games, 2 copies of Office XP, 2 copies of Visual Studio .NET, and a wireless mouse. The kid next to me, by now knowing that I am anti-MS asks me what I would do with those windows programs if I won any of them. I thought about it for a second and told him that I would head home, fire up eBay, and then take what I earned and write out a check for the Free Software Foundation with a nice little note on the check that said "Bribe from Microsoft."
Needless to say, I came home and gave my PowerBook a big hug, went to sleep, and had a marvelous dream about a day when gcc produced better code than VC++ and everyone used OpenOffice.
Posted by dbgrandi at September 17, 2003 01:04 AM | TrackBack