Slashdot Mirror
Closing Time At Microsoft's Campus Pub
theodp writes "Just three days before the Spitfire pub was to open on Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division campus, TechFlash reports that Microsoft got cold feet and pulled the plug on the project, leaving the bar's owner and his 22 employees in the lurch. 'I am completely stunned and disappointed by the decision,' said now lease-less owner Jonathan Sposato, who's stuck with space built out as a pub, complete with a giant bar, a fireplace, and eight beer taps. (He says it wouldn't be economically viable to refit it as a restaurant.) Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed the company's sudden change of heart: 'The goal was always to create a cool gathering place for employees, but to do so in a manner that's consistent with a business environment. We decided we should do something more appropriate, and that meant not having a pub.' The new pub had been in development for more than a year."
"The goal was always to create a cool gathering place for employees..." Where? The state unemployment office?
Some of these people "...left other jobs to work in the pub" That was a really sleazy move by MS.
I'm taking bets that this contract dosn't put the cost of this "change of heart", where it rightfuly belongs.
Hurray for the MS Legal teem, once again ensuring that Microsoft can screw it's business partners with impunity.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The unspoken reality at Microsoft is that there is a large minority of Mormons working in and around Microsoft. While something like caffeinated drinks can be overlooked, something as potent and mind-altering as alcohol is a spit in the face of the Mormon employees.
There is no doubt that some pressure was brought to bear against management when this pub was announced, and though it hasn't been publicized, the Washington state Mormon leaders have been visiting the campus to lobby against the pub.
It sucks for the people who own and work at the pub, but in a silently ultra-religious state like WA, it's no surprise that on of the largest local employers bows to the commands of the puppet masters.
...to beat them over the head with to get his investment back. And in reference to the other post, they could always move the unemployment office into its place.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
I see nothing wrong with employees being able to hang out after hours and maybe even some informal brainstorming could take place. Way to not think differently MSFT. How very boring and corporate America of you.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It seemed like a good idea until they read the last two panels.
My thoughts exactly. Just another form of expression of a basic truth. The fact that a key investor was a former Microsofter only makes this a little sweeter. Consider the words of the great philosophers Mr. T and Nelson.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Hell, it wasn't even in the firehose for me to "downmod". More KD crap.
Thanks, Mormons.
No, not really.
Not flamebait either - local Mormon leaders have been quite vigorously, though quietly, campaigning against the pub, and, apparantly, successfully. Assholes.
Official statement: "There's no such thing as free beer"
More so than any other story, this is the downfall of M$. Everything about them that represented coolness in the face of the uncool -- out the window.
I call this the One Micro$oft Way.
Maybe Microsoft is just afraid that the employees will overshoot the Ballmer Peak.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I'm all for putting a pub in anywhere, including an existing pub (imagine an infinite series of pubs...). That said, does Google have any pubs on their campuses? Honest question, really.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Boy if this isn't Office Space and every boneheaded corporate move ever in a nutshell. Hey let's do something nice for out employees, they're adults who will enjoy this and can have a beer without getting completely drunk and making asses of themselves at work (or we'll fire them, that's fair). Then a lawyer takes a look at it, says you know this looks like it might be fun and actionable, and god knows we don't have any money - better cancel it.
So you end up five times worse than never even having planned it in the first place, because you got everyone's hopes up and now you look like stupid jackasses. But your asses are covered, so all is right with the world! And this is why we pay all you stupid CEOs and MBAs the big bucks, to be dithering asswipes who lead by windsock.
And who knows, Drunk programmers would probably improve the product... ...sure couldn't make it any worse.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Spitfire Pub? Really? They should've canceled the project for pure, simple lack of creativity. Some suggestions, blatantly stolen from responses on an MS blog: Foo Bar, the Status Bar, the Tool Bar, the Task Bar, the Information Bar, Hello World.
You're not a hot blonde.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If the bar fails for any reason, including Microsoft killing it, Microsoft gets all their intellectual property. A deal's a deal.
Just like Sendo on phones.
One wonders if after all these years and this many examples: if the lawyers of Microsoft's potential partners aren't carefully reading the contracts and advising their clients with due diligence, what's in that failure for those lawyers? It could not be possible that Microsoft subverts the legal counsel of their abuse targets first, could it? That would be unethical and unfair. Oh, wait...
Justification for a pub: Google doesn't have one.
Justification for pulling the plug on the pub: Google doesn't have one.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
google should offer the guy put out by this a job making a pub on the google campus.
... on anything. Their word is worthless. The bar owner is now screwed, but he should have known better than to deal with the devil.
They just need to send management to the pub... let them occupy their time with darts and vomit while the engineers work on fixing their operating system.
They no longer have to keep employees happy, since the world economic crisis force employees to hang on to what they got.
It will open as soon as the crisis are over and power is back in the employees court :-)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wouldn't there be one for something like a lease?
Get up!
Time was when England exiled their most violent felons to an island continent penal colony half a world away. Over time the definition for "violent felon" slid from rapist and murderer to pirate, then to treasonous conspirator, and so on until they landed at political dissident. For many years they exported these folk, only to discover later that this was their best and brightest; their free thinkers, their engineers artists and inventors, the folk who were brighter than their superiors. And what were left were Lords and serfs.
So now Australia breeds a more vital breed of men, having been selected from that filter, and England has lost control of them.
Such is as it is with Microsoft. Microsoft has bought into the theory that the top 20% of workers contribute 80% of the work that they've lost sight of how fungible those metrics are. Their 20%ers are folk who threaten the established structure, who are smarter than their bosses, who have scary ideas. It's only right that they migrate from there to Google. Google is Microsoft's Australia.
And no, I've never worked for Microsoft or Google and I still don't and I doubt that I would barring dire circumstance or rude incentive.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The unspoken reality at Microsoft is that there is a large minority of Mormons working in and around Microsoft. While something like caffeinated drinks can be overlooked, something as potent and mind-altering as alcohol is a spit in the face of the Mormon employees.
Wait, what are you smoking? There aren't that many Mormons in the Seattle or east side area on the whole, and nobody cares what they think about drinking. When I worked at MS, the Muslims had a more visible presence (they had a prayer room), and nobody cared about offending them when the Friday beer parties rolled around.
but in a silently ultra-religious state like WA
Again, Huh? For the most part, Washington pretty liberal in religious terms, but the few religious conservatives we have are not silent. Just ask MS about their good friend Rev Hutcherson and his famous anti-gay MS boycots.
I find it rather hard to believe that MS would cave to any religious group after the local PR fiasco that resulted in the whole Hutcherson affair.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I personally would be less worried about a pub than about the software the members were working on and the hours they were putting in.
On the other hand, I suppose that, if I knew that I had a lot of members who might be tempted to backslide if they were working late and a pub was available, and if I had already not had any success on influencing the company to behave more morally towards the customers and employees, I might want to quietly discourage the pub, or push to have it changed to a soft-drink bar or something.
(Yeah, I know about that performance curve. If the performance curve were all there was to worry about, we wouldn't be so uptight about alcohol. One problem with that curve is maintaining the sweet spot when the sellers have a hidden interest in pushing the customer beyond the sweet spot, so to speak.)
But I'll tell you what, if I knew my local leaders had this kind of pull with Microsoft, I'd have been after them to put pressure on Microsoft to back down during the anti-monopoly suit ten years ago. And if I were a stake president in the area now, I'd be tempted to gently encourage the members who work for Microsoft to remember that they have certain moral responsibilities to do what they can to influence the company they work for to behave morally.
A problem with that is that many of the less experienced members would jump to the conclusion that I was requesting that the OS contain methods of forcibly preventing the user from downloading pornography or visiting gaming sites, or something similar. So, if I did so, I'd want to remind them that we respect the freedoms of the end-user, and I'd want to make sure they understood that it is just _my_ opinion, and not church doctrine, that a systems company should build systems designed to help the user avoid malware rather than designed to help them get infected.
So I guess I can't say that I really would, just that I'd be tempted to.
You are completely missing the point. According to the story, they contracted with someone to do a lot of work and waited until he was almost finished to tell him they didn't want what he did. No contract terms can change the fact of that being abusive.
Before software was Microsoft's method of delivering evil (in my opinion). Now Microsoft top managers are apparently investigating other delivery methods.
Here in Germany we can have beer at the workplace. And during lunch.
Oh wait, I'm not in Germany. I just work at a restaurant. My bad.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
...it appears they go about other things the same half-assed way they go about making their software.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Eight beer taps. Is that all? The places I go in Portland usually have 12 or so and I don't even drink beer.
Ballmer Peak
So it would be consistent with Microsoft depending on what year were talking.
Common Sense
Seriousy: such indecision is an indication of failing management. OK: we all change our minds when something unforeseen becomes apparent, but if this happens too often you need to start to ask questions why these things were not discussed in advance. It is likely that you have lackeys at various levels of management who are more interested in ass licking (keeping their boss happy) than doing their job properly and, occasionally, pointing out to the boss that their decision might be wrong. Read at the bottom on the story, there is a link to more major & minor issues where they have changed their minds.
Every time you wanted a drink, or a pretzel, or a peanut, or to use the bathroom did you have to pass an annoying Windows Genuine Advantage check?
I moved from Santa Cruz, California to Austin, Texas to work for Tivoli Systems, which had just become a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM. Tivoli's systems management product TME10 was a perfect match for IBM; with its support for (then) some 42 different flavors of UNIX as well as Windows NT and its megalithic, CORBA-based architecture it was certainly baroque enough a pairing to satisfy any Blue-Suited loyalist. In every other way, however, the Tivoli culture was completely foreign to IBM's operations in the states.
Talking about IBM as if it were a single entity and could be characterized as such is, of course, utter stupidity. I haven't had an update in a while, but if you work on campus in Austin (I didn't, but I visited sometimes to loot the surplus barn) it's all very stodgy, or so I was told by some Tivolites who had repeated occasion to visit its hallowed halls and not simply its rearmost loading dock. (Insert jokes here.) But if you worked for Tivoli then the atmosphere was more than a little relaxed.
While books could be written about the experience of working for a support organization staffed almost entirely by former systems administrators, which while I was there "gained" its "Level 1" front-line support staff which would leave gems in case logs like "dragon drop" and "yowzij" (I'll let you figure out what word that's supposed to be -- suffice to say it was written phonetically) the currently relevant differentiating factor was the Beer Bash. Every Friday the company would knock off a little early and crack open a good number of beers, provided by the company, and stand around in the courtyard shooting the proverbial shit (no firearms involved.)
I don't know if the Beer Bash still survives in any form; by the time I had left the support organization had moved into a satellite site and adopted its own mini-bash, with upgraded appetizers as consolation for exile. To be fair, the main office was within easy walking distance in an office park immediately adjacent to the Arboretum shopping plaza. Most excellent for me, my apartment was approximately equidistant to both, so I could stroll home with ease. But I can tell you that even with the immense (sometimes literally) and diverse cast of interesting characters who worked for Tivoli that the scene was always affable.
Back to the subject of IBM -- while working for Tivoli I also learned that if you worked for IBM consulting in the UK, the two-pint luncheon was pretty much The Way Things Are Done. And by two I mean minimum. They never did send me anywhere, though. They had much more personable individuals for that purpose :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Blue Beerpump of Death.
Para. 1: "... alcohol is anathema to business - in customer facing roles ..."
Para. 2: "... essential lubricant - high level sales, conventions, customers who offer it to salesmen."
You don't think we have a fundamental inconsistency here? I'm not poking fun at the poster, but at business mores.
.for some of the decisions that comes out of Redmound:
"..hiccup..., -I know, I know! - How about we come up with a lame MP3 player and compete directly with Apple? And then give up after a year when it's not making 2000% profit for us"
"..hiccup...., -I know, I know! - How about we release an alpha version of a DRM-bloated OS and get our customers to help us debug it?"
"..hiccup...., -I know, I know! - How about we release an alpha version of a DRM-bloated OS that doesn't work on the hardware, but we'll still say that it's "capable..." (wink, wink)?"
"..hiccup...., -What do you mean he threw a chair through the window? - Yeah, he had just gotten back from the pub, you see..."
"..hiccup...., -I know, I know! - How about we try to patent the internet?"
"..hiccup...., -I know, I know! - How about we try to buy Yahoo - and then show 'em how do a search engine right since we obviously know what we are doing - We'll show that googlely company..."
circa 2007: "..hiccup...., How the hell are we going to make money now that there are better operating systems to use? -I know, I know! - Let's get into the stock market and buy some hedge funds and buy some real estate"..
"..hiccup...., I think I will turn the BSOD into the RSOD, no wait, that reminds me too much of the color of blood, back to the BSOD"...
When you have to campaign to get your way, as do the California Mormons, that's not tyranny, it's persuasion. It's the exact opposite of tyranny.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Surprised nobody posted this...
At the MS pub after a bender... the chair throws you!
Ballmer probably considered that, decided he'd be too scared to join in the fun, and vetoed the idea.
(FWIW I don't usually do funny posts and have them scored down in prefs, but the image of the chair throwing a drunk Ballmer and the shocked/confused/scared/sick look on his face as it did so was just too much for me! I /had/ to post after that!)
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
...time and time again I have heard how various people and businesses who have "partnered up" with Microsoft for various projects were screwed by Microsoft in various ways. I recall things like a phone maker who developed some stuff for Microsoft and then Microsoft caused and created some condition where the phone maker was in breach of contract and then Microsoft claimed all the IP for themselves leaving this other company out to dry. There are lots of other stories where Microsoft screwed people and businesses on deals as well. The lesson that nobody ever learns is NOT to trust Microsoft.
But usually, you hear about Microsoft deals going bust harming other tech businesses... not things like this! But it is still more of the same. Someone changes their mind and "poof!" it's all gone.
Alcohol probably does not cause crime; however, alcohol is an idiot magnet. If I could, I'd live in a dry county. It drives away the people who need to have intoxicants to survive. (I'm "high on life," yes, please call me a fag in email so as not to waste valuable discussion space.)
Think about the magnets for idiots that exists near your neighborhood. The same people who cannot plan ahead more than 24 hours in their lives are the people who, when presented with an opportunity where crime is profitable, impulsively do it. Wal-marts, liquor stores, pawn shops, convenience stores, tattoo parlors, etc. draw these people like moths to light, and that's why many communities have chosen to ban these businesses.
In chaos theory, instant gratification businesses are a "chaotic attractor" that draw in chaotic people ;)
Futurist Traditionalism
look at it from a bussiness perspective... say an employee has a bad day and gets a little toasty and drives home, but on his out of the lot runs over brenda from accounting who is 6 mos pregnant. big nasty lawsuit, having a bar on campus is a big liability, just off site or down the road whatever, not on campus. i used to work for a company who had "team meetings" at a local pub the company picked up the tab. we had some fun times, and low incident rate, but things happen and drinking usually dosent help when things do happen
Really? They don't already have a bar on campus? That surprises me as I would have sworn they were drunk while making some of their past decisions.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Apparently the chairs were fixed to the floor.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
A word or sentence relating this to the original article would have been enlightening, methinks.
I presume you were drunk when you wrote this :-).
Whatever fashion someone sees IBM, I doubt they would shaft a local provider on almost the day he's about to open. That's an approach one expects from we-are-happy-to-promise-anything-as-long-as-it-makes-us-money-and-we-are-not-held-to-it Microsoft, but not from IBM.
I rather like the event (although I feel sorry for the owner) - it just adds tremendous weight to the argument that it does not matter what line of business you're in, dealing with Microsoft is pure poison. No news..
Insert
My thoughts exactly. Just another form of expression of a basic truth. The fact that a key investor was a former Microsofter only makes this a little sweeter. Consider the words of the great philosophers Mr. T and Nelson.
Well put. I know that this is people's livelihoods we're talking about here but this guy should know as well as anyone that when you partner with Microsoft you end up being screwed in the end.
More to the point: Why Microsoft has been making such a habit of changing its mind
I guess that the good, capable people long ago left Microsoft for more friendly surroundings.
Windows Vista's codename was named after the Longhorn pub in Whistler, BC.
Coincidence? I think NOT!
Ruby on Rails Screencast
This is a perfectly good example why one has to be NUTS to do business with Microsoft! They have been screwing their business partners since they started - witness Seattle Computer Products, the developer of QDOS, which was licensed by MS to become PC-DOS and MS-DOS. SCP had to go to court to get MS to pay what they had agreed upon in the original contract and get the software updates MS made to the code base, also included in the original agreement. MS did everything they could to weasel out of it, but fortunately for SCP, the courts agreed that MS had breached its contract with SCP. I seem to recall that the damages were something in the amount of $10M USD - pocket change to MS, but a significant sum to the owners of SCP. The history of Microsoft's behavior toward their business partners over the years is rife with similar examples of exploitation and outright theft. Unfortunately, the people who were invested in the development of the pub in the current example probably did not have a favorable (to them) premature cancellation clause in their contracts with MS, so my guess is that they are out-of-pocket for most or all of their expenses to date.
All of this is why I have been working for the past year to eliminate all of my system dependencies on MS products. So far, I only have two applications that I still have to run on Windows. I think if they were available on OSX then I would invest in a Mac Mini just to eliminate my use of any Microsoft products altogether.
If they claim that a bridge in the middle of their campus would be half-used by non-employees, why wouldn't a pub on campus attract significant non-employee patronage?
One wonders if after all these years and this many examples: if the lawyers of Microsoft's potential partners aren't carefully reading the contracts ..
Screw that, one wonders after countless examples - why would ANYONE ever partner with Microsoft? This recent example shows that even the field involved means nothing.
You may stand to make a ton of money but chances are you aren't going to be the one that ends up with it. So you get years of toil for nothing.
No thanks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not flamebait either - local Mormon leaders have been quite vigorously, though quietly, campaigning against the pub, and, apparantly, successfully.
How do you know they had anything to do with it? Are you saying correlation implies causation?
If I ask you to not drive to pick up some milk from the store, and you decide not to because you are tired or whatever - is it my fault you have no milk?
For more likely, Microsoft lawyers are the culprits. You are simply transferring an irrational hatred of religion to jump to a conclusion that suits you.
Assholes.
Yes, you certainly are. Prejudice is a sad thing to see in action.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What else need be said?
"The new pub had been in development for more than a year."
yup.. sounds exactly like the rest of Microsoft!
Consider the words of the great philosophers Mr. T and Nelson.
Personally I pity the fool who points and says 'haha...'
He'll get his milk and cookies some day and wake up on airplane with a bad attitude.
The thing is, the Spitfire in belltown that the same guy runs completely sucks and is one of the most consistently empty places I've ever been in. Poor Service, Overpriced Food and Drinks, and generally not a fun place to hang out.
I don't suppose that the real reason MSFT pulled from it was that they realized it was just going to suck?
This seems like a wise move on Microsoft's part. They've never been able to manage "free as in freedom", and now they're steering well clear of "free as in beer".
What about the Progress Bar?
The wait time is atrocious.
Ah, just another small piece of evidence that Microsoft is a culture completely lacking in imagination and spirit to pull off anything of any further importance. The writing's been on the wall since 2001, but here it is again: there will never, ever be another significant product out of Microsoft. Profits from the legacy, yes. Entrenched backoffice tools (a la IBM), yes. But anything that the public cares about? No. The only direction left to go is slowly downward. I am sure there are some talented folks at MS, but as a culture the company is finished. The truly creative are leaving for better places to shine. And drink beer.
This sounds like a perfect place for an Apple store.
You're doing it wrong. Here's a tutorial on how you drink beer:
1. Order a full mug
2. Drink a half of it in one go
3. Socialize, eat something
4. Drink a half of the remaining half
5. Socialize, eat something
6. Drink the remainder
7. Go to step 1
And then they realized that they weren't Google and shitcanned the idea.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, I'm sure the presence of a Mormon Temple approx 6 miles due south (straight down 148th) of Microsoft's Redmond campus means there are very few Mormons in the area.
This one here: http://www.panoramio.com//photo/1320452
I think you you're talking about the Amish there. The mormons i know are very apt at using a pc.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
Research has shown (the Japanese still practice) that providing an relaxed open environment such as a pub actually increases productivity.
Civilization, the death of dreams.
Yeah right, puppet masters? What kind of conspiracy are you trying to push around here?
He probably wasn't referring to the Mormons but most likely the Stonecutters (probably the group located in Springfield). You know, the ones that hold back the electric car and make Steve Guttenberg a star.
to avoid doing direct business with Microsoft. They can and will pull the plug at any time without notice and leave you hanging. Worse, they are in such a position to do so with little recourse. For this reason alone, this wannabe pub owner (ex-Microsoft employee?) should have known to not rely on Microsoft to follow through.
The first mistake, however, was to assume that it was appropriate to place a pub on corporate grounds anyway. This has a big red flag all over it. I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't have questioned this move up front.
I had the misfortune of ending up with a web development client who is a former Microsoftie, her husband was also VP of sales there for like 14 years, and I can honestly say I have never come across a worse backstabbing, double talking, two-faced, cocaine addicted, paranoid, clueless, arrogant, abusive, cheap, thieving, ignorant, asinine, imbecilic, life sucking leech . . . many of them Microsoft people are the scum of the earth, and I can say that from direct experience.
SARAVA!
Putting a beer bar on your corporate campus sounds good but it's a bonehead move. I worked at Southwest Airlines where they had a kegger every Friday on the roof overlooking Love Field. One of the girls I worked with, a large bullheaded girl with a nasty attitude, got buzzed but good at one of those parties and plowed into a telephone pole on the drive home. Totalled her car. Brain damage. Last I heard she was suing Southwest for being so irresponsible as to serve beer to an idiot like her.
Build a bar on your corporate campus and the idiots will come and claim your corporation through the power of their own idiocy.
Your answer looks something like this and my answer looks something like this. The difference is quite subtle but it's there.
Help stamp out iliturcy.