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Video - The wonders of international business (at Microsoft)

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I've worked on both sides of the Microsoft international equation - in the UK as the sub rep on various projects trying to get corp to understand the local market 'situation and challenges' and more recently in Redmond as the 'Corp' program manager acting as chief cat herder: planning, coordinating and getting 'buy in'.

This video of Microsoft's internal international 'engagement' is just a little too close to reality for comfort...like the first conf-call clip. If you work in a sub or with subs at MS, you'll know what I mean.

Update:

Other thoughts on this. Acronyms.

The acronyms that fly about in the video are all pretty much real and used almost as liberally as the video depicts (the excpetion is 'GB'). A lot are standard international jargon (LATAM, EMEA, APAC), some derive from economic roots (G7, G8, G29 - although these mean different things for different contexts within MS) and others seem to be purely MS-created (CRMG, BMO, BG, BOM, GTMs - mainly marketing). We do have an internal site 'Microsoft Acronyms' which is required reading for any MS newb. Without a read through it, you'd be completely lost in the first few seconds of most conversations / meetings / conf calls here. And that's for company-wide jargon. Each team / unit tends to develop their own specialised lexicon, though few teams are thoughtful enough to collate and share these on a site for the unit newcomers. You just have to ask. I came across a new one last week - 'ack'. It was response to a mail that I sent. 'ack' is all that came back. It's generally used, not just at MS apparently. Can you guess it?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2006
    That is way too close to the truth -- especially the arrogance and small world view of the people in Redmond.

    One thing the video didn't capture is trying to attend a meeting remotely. In Redmond, a single phone is placed in the middle of the table and sometimes it picks up what the people near it are saying, but it never gets the people in the rest of the room. It used to be a nightmare to collaborate on releases when I was still in San Francisco.
  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2006
    The opposit of ACK is NAK....
  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2006
    <object style="width:425px; height:335px;" id="ms" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/22RC10tKhz6DbmOC">
  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2006
    Oh, I laughed, I cried. How familiar is that all. I agree, I followed most of the acronyms, but the GB was taking it too far.