Wow, the amount of circlejerking in here about Microsoft by people who apparently know very little about the company is extremely depressing.
How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a picture of the campus that they're talking about. Everything below the big tree line in the middle of the picture is Microsoft's campus. Note that it's not even the whole thing. The campus is huge and extends outside of the picture in every direction but north. It's relevant because it puts into perspective how massive their campus is.
> Everything below the big tree line in the middle of the picture is Microsoft's campus. Note that it's not even the whole thing. The campus is huge and extends outside of the picture in every direction but north. Thanks for the background! Where did you get this information (it sounds like you're already intimately familiar with it)? The caption on the image certainly doesn't convey it. IMO one shouldn't have to go…
I know this because I used to work on Windows :) Our part of the campus is (or was?) in the lower left portion. My office was just outside the lower left of the picture.
The big hole in the ground (right in the middle of the image) eventually became this: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails...
In that picture, you see the common area. The buildings on the left and right both have places to eat, as well as some shops for employees only (like an AT&T store, a UPS store, and a few others). There is also usually an art exhibit in the left building. In the background, the green field you see is an olympic (iirc) sized soccer field. In the winter, they sometimes put an ice skating rink on a portion of it.
Surrounding the area seen in that image (but not visible, unfortunately), are four new office buildings in the same style as the common buildings (but twice as tall). They're referred to as Studios A, B, C or D. One of them houses a lot of the XBox teams (and Microsoft game studios), not sure about the other 3.
The Microsoft campus is truly a marvel. It's giant, has it's own transportation system, has the world's largest underground parking garage (it's actually underneath the buildings in the image I linked above) and every day over 50,000 people come and go to it. It's a mini-city in every way.
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#83In 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.
From the article it seems that they took whatever they had and tied into a single sensor network mesh, possibly adding some new sensors along the way. So a lot of the cost is fully depreciated already.
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#84This is a pretty poor attempt at copying the NY Times design for their Snow Fall project ( http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne... ). It's lacking the top nav and the typography is terrible. Generally just lacks some polish and execution.
I'm on Chrome (OSX) and the bottom nav nauseatingly slides up and down, up and down, up and... you get the idea.
Looks like they rushed to push this out. Expect more from Microsoft.
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? There's more than just one page? I know MS is a favorite target, but this honestly looks like it was designed by an intern. More importantly, it reads like a jewelry advertorial in an in-flight magazine.
Is anyone able to watch the videos to the end? They seem to stop mid way for me- all of them. And I have a pretty fast connection.
They also die when I attempt to go fullscreen. Gave up.
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#86This is a pretty poor attempt at copying the NY Times design for their Snow Fall project ( http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne... ). It's lacking the top nav and the typography is terrible. Generally just lacks some polish and execution.
I was about to comment on how it is such a beautifully designed site, yet you get to the 'next page' button which is a low res scaled arrow graphic.. this totally ruins the experience.
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#87In 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.
Well, they saved quite a lot by not paying the billion and a half dollars that they owe Washington state in taxes, so they can afford it.
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#88As a counterpoint to all the negative comments about this article's typography and navigation, I viewed this article in IE9 at work and had absolutely no problems with the typography (which properlyl displays as Segoe UI) or with navigation. Who would have thought that a Microsoft website looks best in a Microsoft browser?
Likewise, I had no problems in Firefox 20. I don't know why people are complaining so much.
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#89All 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.
Not too different from a large college campus (the U of MD was like this, with approximately the same number of people on campus).
It does put a damper on cross-group communication, but it's probably better than having a collection of skyscrapers. Also, Redmond doesn't like buildings more than 3 stories tall (their fire equipment can't deal -- why MS can't buy Redmond different fire equipment is beyond me).
Re: How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
#90In 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…
It means that a lot more than $66,000 worth of product and services had to be sold to pay for one simple mistake.
Even Microsoft don't have 100% gross margin.