Microsoft: not that evil, after all.

It’s a funny thing when you grow up hearing about one of the companies that started it all. You create expectations and formulate questions in your mind, about how the company works on the inside. About how their employees must be given small repetitive tasks to build their OS. About the reasons for their lack of acceptance of open source as a wide movement. About some of their weird choices.

And it was good, or rewarding in a weird sort of way, to have finally seen Microsoft from the inside, last week. Meeting the people and the projects. The buildings and the company store. Comparing my idea of Microsoft to what I was actually seeing of Microsoft. I was, to say the least, positively surprised.

Now, I still use a Mac. I still have connections to open-source projects. My default search engine is still Google (even though I’m starting to question whether it should stay that way). But my respect for the company and their attempts of creating good software has increased. They’re humans, after all, and it seems like there’s a lot of change going on in small sections of the (56.000 people) company. Like Scoble told me in a dinner at Berkeley once, it takes inhuman strength to move the huge machine that Microsoft has become. But some people are trying.

And that’s good to see. As I’ve said in a comment to a post by Brady Forrest (PM for MSN Search), I expect Microsoft to innovate instead of rewriting, and to surprise instead of disappointing. Their employees sure have the skills and the right mindset, so, there’s virtually nothing stopping them.