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How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

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Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#71

Post by mynameisvlad »

roc wrote: post #56
bluedino wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't most large software companies have a 'campus' feel to their headquarters? I would imagine back in the 80's when they were designed/created, nobody wanted to go work inside a towering, souless, black glass skyscraper for 10 hours a day. A lot of people would kill for a view of water and trees and the ability to walk outside at lunch.

How many campuses have you seen, that are covered in that much concrete? While greenery is great, I'd rather be able to walk to a proper park than have it in the form of a glorified berm between parking lots.

You have clearly never been to the Microsoft campus. There's trees and green everywhere, and parking, for the most part, is in a parking building or underneath the buildings. There's actually very little overground non-enclosed parking.

Hell, even the photo itself doesn't have that much exposed concrete apart from the buildings themselves. You can clearly see that there's a lot of greenery surrounding buildings.

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#72

Post by mynameisvlad »

potatolicious wrote: post #49
dspeyer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an exaggeration. While Seattle is painfully distant (painful really is the word for the 520 bridge) Bellevue is right next door. Bellevue is a city of 122k people, bigger than Ann Arbor. It's no great cultural center, but it's certainly more than just Microsoft people.

And unlike Ann Arbor it has neither the diverse industrial or academic base to provide for a diverse population. Bellevue is still largely an extension of Redmond, though admittedly not as thoroughly MSFT-dominated as Redmond proper thanks to some tech presence in Kirkland. Bellevue can hope to have the diversity of Ann Arbor when they import a state school and a few cornerstone employers that aren't Microsoft or Mic…

... "Bel-Red" is the road separating Bellevue and Redmond. That's why it exists.

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#73

Post by tsuyoshi »

potatolicious wrote: post #22
andrewguenther wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Just curious

I think the complaint may be more about the location than the campus itself. Redmond, WA, is for all intents and purposes a Company Town. It's pretty remote, and the entirety of the city revolves around a single employer. Everyone who works there either works directly for Microsoft or is closely affiliated with Microsoft business. Ditto everyone who lives there. It's far from the nearest major city (Seattle), and to…

I don't think this is entirely accurate. I used to live in Seattle, and my parents currently live in Redmond (about a mile from Microsoft), but virtually all of the people I know in that area have nothing to do with Microsoft. It's dominant to be sure, but not absolutely everyone is affiliated with them.

Plus it's not all that remote. It is a typically boring suburb with tract houses and squat apartment buildings punctuated by strip malls, but it is only 20-40 minutes from downtown Seattle (I've done the trip many many times). I think living in Seattle and commuting to Microsoft via the 545 is a reasonable commute. I used to do something similar when I lived in Green Lake and worked in Kirkland.

But don't get me wrong, I agree that locating a major company there instead of Seattle, or at least Bellevue, is a mistake. I just don't think calling it a remote company town is a fair characterization.

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#74

Post by kragen »

astangl wrote: post #69
kragen wrote: post #59

> That data has given the team deep insights What a shame they didn't bother to include any of them in the article. Instead they filled it with shitty similes like this: > Microsoft’s buildings were experiencing data dissonance that would make the works of Igor Stravinsky sound like a barbershop quartet. I was no fan of Microsoft in its Gates days, but I can't imagine it would have produced anything as bad as this ar…

When I hear somebody say 900,000 milliseconds, it makes me wonder why he didn't quote the number in nanoseconds or worse. On top of all the other problems with this puff piece, I couldn't shake the feeling that Microsoft will probably end up leading the way in buildings susceptible to viruses and other malware, consistent with their security record. My expectation with implementing anything like this is that you imme…

He was probably quoting a whole series of time intervals in milliseconds: "if the valve doesn't open within 200 milliseconds or the air is being overcooled by more than two degrees after 900 000 milliseconds".

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#75

Post by zem »

am i the only one who found this exciting? sure, the tone and content are puff-piecey, but reading between the lines they are doing some genuinely interesting things with data acquisition and centralised control, and proving that it works on a largish scale, with measurable (not to mention large!) savings in terms of money and energy.

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#76

Post by otikik »

umsm wrote: post #63
auctiontheory wrote: post #61

Microsoft realizing it can no longer compete in software and turning instead to real estate ... will be the mother of all pivots.

Technically, they dominate the desktop OS and office suite markets.

They didn't need the "Technically" before.

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#77

Post by Maarten88 »

cmelbye wrote: post #25
alyx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know bashing Microsoft is oh-so-tempting, but can you at least try discussing the actual article here?

But some people can't even read the "actual article" because the navigation is so broken.

I was reading it on a Surface tablet using Metro-IE10 and thought the design and navigation were very slick. It works very well on it, every page starts with a fullscreen image, scrolling down the text appears while the image fades, at the bottom of the page the pagination links appear.

I looked at the NY Times project article and that did not work as well on Surface. They were undoubtedly inspired by it, maybe they optimized the design of this article as a showcase for their own tablet.

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#78

Post by malyk »

All the technology stuff is great, but as for this being the city of the future? Pass!

It's far to spread out. It's not very walkable. There's too much space dedicated to parking. etc. It fails almost every test for being a good city. It's basically a technology enabled suburb. Gross.

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#79

Post by thestoic »

kragen wrote: post #59

> That data has given the team deep insights What a shame they didn't bother to include any of them in the article. Instead they filled it with shitty similes like this: > Microsoft’s buildings were experiencing data dissonance that would make the works of Igor Stravinsky sound like a barbershop quartet. I was no fan of Microsoft in its Gates days, but I can't imagine it would have produced anything as bad as this ar…

Agreed. unsatisfactory to read an article about data with very little data in it!

Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

#80

Post by spydum »

johnohara wrote: post #14

In one building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66,000 of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected. And also why this work is important. Environmental and conservation arguments aside, it means $66,000 worth of product and services had to be sold to pay for one simple mistake. In larg…

what they don't mention, is how much it cost to build and support this massive sensor infrastructure and analytics. I would wager $66k/year is a drop in the bucket.
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