Microsoft’s annual company meeting was held at Safeco Field in Seattle last Thursday. It’s a day-long event with speeches, demos, and, of course, Bill and Steve. The crowd was pretty enthusiastic; the vibe was positive. It reminded me of the company meetings during my first years at Lotus — back when the company was still on a roll. Of course the size of the meetings were quite different; Lotus rented out a ballroom at the Sonesta, not an entire stadium.
There were about 14,000 people at the meeting this year. That’s an aspect of Microsoft that’s hard to avoid talking about: size and locality. IBM has nearly five times as many employees but I never saw more than 1,000 in one place at the same time. Roughly half of Microsoft’s employees work in the Puget Sound area. So doing a company meeting where a large percentage of the employees can be physically present is still feasible.
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