1 Men Must Change
1992. Redmond, Washington. Consumer Division. Building 17.
I remember walking the halls of Building 17 in the middle of the night, just days before the deadline for shipping a product, the unmistakable smell of stale pizza in the air, combined with the whiff of half‐a‐dozen unwashed engineers pulling their third all‐nighter.
The early 1990s were heady days for us young punks working in tech. The average age of a Microsoft employee at the time was about 29, but it felt like 19. And the population was overwhelmingly male and almost all white. In between muddy afternoon soccer matches in front of Building 8 and impromptu runs to the local Godfather's restaurant to play grease‐buttoned Asteroids, we worked our butts off creating the most innovative technology solutions to everyday problems.
Inventing new product categories was my personal specialty. After abruptly chickening out of law school, I started a games company, which grew to 42 employees at the beginning of the “software renaissance.” We made some of the very first games on the Nintendo, Sega, and NEC consoles, each project an exploration in new gaming experiences. When I came to Microsoft to get a “real job,” my projects were an interactive TV show for kids, a web‐based episodic comic book in which the pages spoke to you, and eventually the first game console that could push 124,000 polygons per second. We were changing the world one ship cycle at a time, years before Google, Amazon, or Facebook. ...