Made Out Of People: Microsoft Edition

In Thursday’s New York Times (and NPR, and virtually every other news organization in the world), we learned that Microsoft was cutting back:

The layoffs span across research, sales, finance and technology roles, the company said.

To be slightly more precise – as some later prints of the article mention --

The layoffs span across research & development, sales, finance and technology roles, the company said.

We run into this in other contexts, too. In Microsoft’s annual balance sheet, we learn that R&D made up $2.2 billion in 2008—and, again, that gets rephrased as Microsoft spending billions on research, both from Microsofties and others (such as this Boston globe article).

There’s an important difference between “Research & Development” and “Research” at Microsoft—and at most other software companies. It’s a natural mistake. At most businesses,”R&D” is a fairly small bit of the budget, and its largely undifferentiated. At a car company, the amount of money that goes into designing next year’s car is far smaller than the big costs: sheet metal, assembly, transportation. Cars are expensive things, even if you have the blueprint in hand. There’s a whole lot of people who are out there welding together car parts. At a car company, too, the R&D are not necessarily distinct (at least to the outside world): there company dedicates a chunk of its budget to both improving underlying technologies and developing future years’ cars.

At Boeing, say, the costs are more balanced. It costs a lot to figure out how to build a 787, and a lot to build it.

In contrast, the manufacturing cost of a copy of Windows is virtually nothing. Stamping a DVD or printing off a license takes all of a few seconds. There are ongoing costs to support that license, and to keep that machine running stably, but the real cost of Windows comes early in—when a team of humans sits there, tapping away at computers, writing new software. Same for Office, or any other product. (Not as much for XBox, which has a substantial hardware costs.) That team of people are called “developers”, and that slew of developers is really what makes up the bulk.

So at Microsoft, R&D is a huge chunk of the budget, and manufacturing is smaller.

Within R&D, we have researchers and developers—and they are meaningfully distinct roles. There are some 700-odd researchers at Microsoft Research; we try to figure out how to do things that no one has done before. Preferably, things that are generally thought to be impossible. There are tens of thousands of developers at Microsoft; they build operating systems and word processors and databases and all sorts of things that we generally do know how to do, but want to do better.

(In addition, there are a number of smaller hybrid “advanced development” groups—Live Labs, Virtual Earth Labs, Office Labs—which sit somewhere in between.)

What this means is that when you see that “R&D” figure—or a reporter short-handedly writing “research”—it’s not just the 700-or-so researchers in the US, China, India, and the UK. It’s also several tens of thousands of others at Microsoft who makes products.

(Thanks to Kevin for some clarifications on this.)

So far, walking around Seattle yesterday, I have seen two attempts to use Obama as a marketing gimmick:

1. A coffee shop selling “Obama” blend. I assume Hawaiian & Kenyan, but I don’t know.
2. A furniture store offering a “20% off! Change You Can Believe In!” with the Obama O on top. There were perhaps a dozen of those signs through the store: it wasn’t a one-off.

I decided that I wasn’t interested in walking into the furniture store (and I don’t drink coffee anyway). A political campaign may well be a branding project, but taking advantage after the election seems just to be riding someone else’s coat tails.  And probably violating a trademark. (Taking advantage of the brand before the election is entirely different: it’s signaling that the store owner is willing to take a risk on his political affiliation.)

A few quick notes on how incentive systems can have odd second-order effects

I was talking with Wendy Mackay, at INRIA, yesterday, and we were talking about the Active Badges system from Xerox PARC and Euro PARC, now from about 15 years ago. Active Badges were a lot like any other corporate badge: they let you in and out the door. Unlike other corporate badges, though, they tracked your physical location. Active Badges resulted in studies of people moving through physical spaces, visualizations of who is in or out of the office, and social network analyses of who was near whom.

Wendy pointed out that the studies suffered from a tremendous amount of noise. People would would give each other their badges as they walked around, would leave their badges at their desks, would share badges to get through the doors. This wasn’t an anti-surveillance thing: it wasn’t at all clear that they were doing it more than they had before the study. It’s just that there was no reason not to, and it was often easier to reach over and grab someone else’s badge than it was to fish through your purse. Not long after we spoke, I saw one of her students return from a quick trip and pass the badge they were carrying back to the owner.

I was flabbergasted. At Microsoft, I’ve never heard of people doing that. I don’t think it’s that Microsofties are exceptionally compliant with the rules, nor do I think that employees are scared of punishment for misbehavior. And I’m pretty sure that we don’t think of ourselves as highly security conscious: all sorts of people wander the halls without badges. (Certainly, when I had a grad student office, we all shared keys.) But, on the other hand, a Microsoft badge is also a stored-value card with money on it. Swipe it at a starbucks or a lunch counter and you pull money off of it. It’s real money: it gets deducted from your paycheck, or replenished with cash.

I’m not claiming that this means I don’t trust my colleagues. I doubt any of them would go off and buy a cup of coffee with my card. But it probably does that we all think of them like money, rather than like (say) keys, and so we are generally careful of them.

I don’t know whether that was what was intentional on the part of corporate security: honestly, I suspect it was just a matter of convenience to unify the several badging systems. But the upshot is fascinating: if I am reading this right, putting money on cards teaches people to treat cards individually. And that, in turn, would make a system like Active Badges’ traces much more accurate.

Those of you who know me personally might not take me as a sensitive soul. A delicate, blushing flower. A gentle ray of light, damaged by the slightest of touches. But if you’ve been out to a movie with me, you’ve learned the truth.

Somehow, I twitch when I see violence on-screen. The more that I can empathize with the recipient of the violence, the more I cringe. Cartoonish violence might elicit a slight grimace; I’ll hide under the chair if I believe it—if the director wants me to believe it. (“300” and “Cowboy Bebop” cause me no more than the occasional wince, for example, while my neck hurt for quite a while watching “Million Dollar Baby.”)

This leaves me in a difficult situation with many fine movies. Friends have warned me against various films that I’m unlikely to enjoy. Some I’m willing to brave despite the descriptions: for example, I watched Dark Knight because, well, it was Dark Knight and it was good. Quantum of Solace was cartoonish enough to not bother me in the least.

And that brings me to my review of Slumdog Millionaire. There I am, walking into the theater. It’s pitched as a comedy/romance, and everyone loves it (92% at Rotten Tomatoes)—a great date film for the night before Thanksgiving weekend. I’m with it. I vaguely recognize the name “Danny Boyle”, but don’t put it together until I leave.

“Danny Boyle.” That’s Trainspotting. Trainspotting holds a special place in my history as a movie that I loved every minute of it that I watched—but I watched very little of it. (The remainder I believe I spent hiding behind the seat.) The acting was brilliant, the writing was incredible, the humor was well-balanced—and needles on screen make me far more anxious than needles in person. I made it through, but only because my friends kept lying, and telling me that it calmed down after this scene.

Bastards.

Anyway, Slumdog Millionaire is amazing. It’s the story of a man who is just about to win the big prize on the Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire.” He’s not very educated, and barely literate, and, we learn, hopelessly in love with a woman he’s lost several times. Destiny, however, seems to bring him to where he is: the events in his life (told through flashbacks) line up nicely with the acts of the game show. The meat of the movie is in the flashbacks: to his childhood in the slums, his premature orphaning, his apprenticeship to a Fagan-like beggar king, and so on. The photography in these flashbacks is vivid and lush: the photographer wants us to know about the richness and beauty of India, but also the misery and poverty. One act happens in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, just so we can sometimes look over and see it glowing in the distance, and perhaps contrast these slums with that beauty.

Over time, he meets a girl; she will turn up over and over again in his life. She’s his destiny, and her existence drives his own actions inexorably forward to the game of Millionaire. And yet--

--and yet, I walked out. Regretting every step of it, I needed to go. I’d seen an eye cut out with a spoon, and a scene or two of brutal torture played, if not for laughs, then at least a little lightly. It clearly wasn’t going to get better, and when character staggers in, threatening and drunken, to the horror of those around him, I decided that it was enough of a movie for the night. Perhaps, like episodes of Battlestar Galactica, I’ll watch this in 20 minute segments, hoping that the next bit will be happier.

Until then, I’m giving this a mixed thumbs up. If your version of escapist romantic comedy can include torture, than this movie is a fine one, and worth bringing your family to. If, like me, you get a little shaky—well, perhaps the several uplifting World War II movies coming out this season are more your speed.

I try to keep this relatively non-political (god knows we see enough of that everywhere else), but I need to remark on the energy last night. I don't know that I've seen this sort of energy anywhere. Certainly not over a political victory in ironic hipster Seattle. And yet: people shouting "USA!" and singing patriotic songs ("God Bless America", "America the Beautiful", "Star Spangled Banner"). Waving flags. Dancing in the streets.

Clinton-Dole didn't really drive this much excitement. Nor did Mondale-Reagan. How far back do you have to go to with this many people responding this strongly?

Photos from the corner of Broadway & Pike, about midnight on the morning of November 5, 2008, in a crowd of a thousand or so people.

The sign on the mailbox says "Last pickup is over. Take your ballot to local polling location! Your vote counts!"