Debarshi's den - দেবর্ষির ডেড়া

Getting an opportunity to have a peek inside the offices of Microsoft is undoubtedly one of the most cherished dreams of today's young men and women. I was no different. Last Christmas, my dreams were fulfilled when I got the chance to spend a day inside Microsoft Campus in Gachibowli, Hyderabad as part of our departmental industrial tour to Bangalore and Hyderabad. The role of Santa Claus was played by our alumnus, Manuj Bahl who had joined 'the corp' as a Senior Application Developer a few months back.

Standing outside the gates of the campus, I could smell the aura that covered the biggest, richest, and most successful software firm of all time. The nine letters, M I C R O S O F T, emblazoned across the main building had a larger than life appeal that had every soul in the vicinity gaping and drooling. Countless photographs were clicked, and each one of them had those nine letters in some form or the other.

The formalities were soon taken care of, and we stepped in. Our first destination was a audio-visual room where an interaction session was organized for us. We were greeted by Sriram Krishnan and Pratibha Kumar, and what followed was an amazing concotion of gyan-talk, informal gossip, and a sumptuous diet. I also got a chance to paint water colours and pastels on Sriram's tablet PC!

But I was still not satisfied. How could I be? There had to be a flame war. How could a GNU Project maintainer feel satisfied basking in the glory of Microsoft and munching Domino's Pizza's for free?

I did not have to wait too long though, as the topic of discussion soon swerved around to stuff like: "Who had the best search engine? Google or MSN?", "Why Microsoft's policies were justified?", "How Microsoft was being Opensource friendly by having six projects on Sourceforge?", "Why the Windows team deemed ext3 support unnecessary?", and so on. One noticeable point was that although Sriram and company vehemently said "Why do you want to use Linux?", and "Do you know the number of bugs and insecurities uncovered in Mozilla?", Sriram still preferred to keep Mozilla Firefox installed in his tablet PC! Kudos to Bill Gates for allowing him to do so, but I could not help thinking that our hosts were being slightly hypocritical. The trio of Sriram, Pratibha, and Manuj passionately pointed out how Microsoft Maps was superior to Google Earth; how Hotmail is going to be a far better email service; how MSN's search engine throws out better search results than Google; how Windows Live was a fantastic service being offered by Microsoft; and so on and so forth. It was quite a nice performance I must say, although they would have done a far better job if they had put more emphasis on the fact that most of the services they were praising were still in beta stage and only available to Microsoft itself. A visit to Google might just have given a completely different view of things, with Google beating its drum at the expense of Microsoft's. However time was running short, and our discussion ended with a quick photo shoot followed by Sriram's invitation to continue the discussion over email.

The cerebral stuff over, it was now time to flex our muscles. The synthetic lawn tennis court, the basketball and volleyball courts, the pool tables, and the XBoxes were the centres of attraction. After trying my hand at tennis for a couple of hours, during which Sanket ended up giving tips to some M$ employees regarding the finer points of the game and I sent the tennis balls flying out of the court, I hurried off to lay my hands on the XBox. What an experience it was? The force feedback gamepads were one of the uncountable first time experiences that I had at Microsoft.

At the end of it all, I could only feel a sense of immense gratitude towards Manuj sir for giving such a memorable Christmas present. Thank you Santa!