I had lunch today with Dan Ling, the corporate vp for Microsoft Research. We had a lovely discussion about social computing topics, as well as my impressions of Microsoft thus far.
I realized that the biggest problem I’ve encountered here is a growing sense of isolation—if I don’t make a proactive effort to schedule time with other people, I end up spending the day in my bare, windowless office. And since I tend to do my best thinking when I’m engaged in discussion with others, this hasn’t been a healthy thing.
Dan pointed out that the MSR office buildings’ design doesn’t facilitate informal meetings at all. Too many isolated corridors, high-traffic locations like kitchen and restrooms opening up onto narrow connecting corridors rather than open areas. I really miss the Golisano building at RIT—it really did a great job of facilitating informal interaction. :(
During the course of our discussion, I also mentioned to Dan my critique of the Virtual Earth Katrina maps. When he asked whom I’d sent it to, I told him I’d blogged it rather than sending it out. Perhaps I need to make a point of letting people internally know when I’ve blogged about Microsoft stuff, though, since it’s unreasonable to think that they’re all hanging on my every word here!
Clearly, I need to start being more proactive in a number of ways, which starts with my requesting some office space over in RedWest with the MSN search folks, so that I can interact with them more regularly as they start to roll out potentially cool new features. I also have to take the initiative in scheduling regular lunch and/or coffee dates with people whose work I’m interested in, so that I can find ways to contribute a little more around here.
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