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Q&A: What kind of computers do you use in MacBU and Microsoft?

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In response to my open question thread, I got this question:

do they force you to use PCs ? if yes what kind of machine do you have ? and what kind of Macs also ?

and if not, what about MS employees outside the MacBU ? can they choose to use a Mac (with Entourage of course :-) ) ?

I do have a Windows box, although there was no force or coercion involved. :) As it turns out, Microsoft is a pretty Windows-centric company, so there are plenty of tools that I need to use that are only available on Windows. As a UX researcher, many of those tools (such as our bug tracking system and our code repository) aren't ones that I use frequently -- it's a strange week if I've accessed my Windows box more than once. The two Windows-only tools that I use the most frequently are for booking travel and submitting my expenses. Since my Windows needs are low, I don't use VMWare or Boot Camp to have Windows on my Mac. My Windows box lives headless under my desk. I exclusively access it via Remote Desktop Connection.

I primarily use two Macs. I travel a lot, and even when I'm in California I'm not in my office that much, so my main Mac is a MacBook Pro. In my office, I've also got a Mac Mini. The Mini gets most of its use when we're getting early seeds of the next version of OS X, so that I can get a feeling for the UX changes and start to determine how that impacts my work. It also runs iTunes all the time, and I have sharing enabled so that others can listen to my music.

Other people in MacBU have a different matrix of computers. For example, many of our developers aren't quite as mobile as I am, so they often choose to get a spiffy Mac Pro as their primary workstation. I touched on this in another blog post from a couple of months ago: Q&A: what hardware do you use when testing Office:Mac?

As for the rest of Microsoft, it's a big company with lots of people and lots of different needs, so there's no blanket policy. It's up to the particular group that someone is in as to what is available to them. I know folks in other groups who use Macs, sometimes as their primary workstation, other times not. It's more about their needs than anything else: what computer, and what operating system, best meets their business needs so that they can do their job more effectively. There are folks for whom running OS X all the time wouldn't make a lot of sense. For example, if you're a developer on Access, your life is lived in Visual Studio and in our tracking system, and using OS X would just get in the way because your tools are Windows tools. There are other folks who use Macs because it does make sense for them. For example, there are some more Macs around the Exchange hallways because both Safari and Firefox get the full experience in Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2010, and it makes plenty of sense for the developers and testers involved in that work to use a Mac.

I know it always makes the blogs when someone sees a Microsoft employee running Windows on a Mac, or running a Mac at all, which I always find amusing. Microsoft's a big company, with lots of groups that have different needs and different goals. Assuming that Macs are verboten across the company because we make Windows ignores the reality of being a big company in lots of different markets.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 24, 2009
    Nadyne, Thanks for this post. I was actually about to ask about the same question--I was just hired by Microsoft as a summer SDET intern (I'll be at the SVC with the Windows Live team) and I was wondering about Microsoft's general friendliness towards Macs; which this post answers pretty well. The other half of the question was: "Can I get a tour of the Office:Mac portion of the office sometime during the summer?" :) Max

  • Anonymous
    November 25, 2009
    SVC is where I work (along with ~1/2 of MacBU), so come over to building 5 sometime during the summer and I'll give you the grand tour. :)  I'll be happy to introduce you to some of the folks around our hallways as well, if you'd like to know about other opportunities within Microsoft after you've graduated.  I'm sure someone's mentioned to you that MS quite likes hiring former interns after they've graduated, and that's certainly been a great source of talent for us in MacBU.  

  • Anonymous
    November 25, 2009
    thanks, I asked you about this because that's not the case everywhere ; I don't know about your previous experiences but I know lots of company who don't let people choose. I live in France and here the idea is still 'Windows for work and Mac for anything that's not "serious" (design, image, etc)', so I'm happy the most Windows-ish company in the world leave the choice to its employees.

  • mathieu
  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2009
    Oh yes, I've worked for companies that didn't let you choose.  I worked for IBM before coming to Microsoft, and had no choice at all about my workstation, and could only install a handful of approved apps. To contrast that to my experience in MacBU, my computer is my own.  I can install on it what I like (obviously so long as it's legal to do so, either I own it or we have site license for it).  I also have a lot of latitude in choosing what I use.  For Windows boxes, our internal ordering system has some suggestions for various job roles, but there's a wide variety of suggestions and I can go outside that if I have the need (and the budget) to do so.  For my Mac, my manager doesn't care what I use so long as it meets my needs and is within budget.