Last Friday, the Seattle P-I ran a nice story on the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft, which included a photo of some of the Mac BU staffers seated in front of racks of Mac computers. I read it and appreciated it, but at the time, I didn’t give it much more thought.
Today, Todd Bishop points out that a few other readers drew some amusingly suspicious conclusions based on the fact that the computers in the photo were older model G3’s, and not new G5’s…
One person who e-mailed raised the issue of the Microsoft contract worker who was fired after posting a photo of new PowerMac G5s arriving on campus. The e-mailer put that situation together with the newspaper photo and theorized that Microsoft was trying to hide the fact that it had bought new G5s. He asked if the company prevented the P-I from taking the photo in front of any G5s.
Amusing as this is…sorry, folks, nothing so dastardly!
I hate to dispel a good conspiracy theory, but in fact, we were given a full tour of the test lab — which includes PowerMac G5s and basically every other Mac ever made, as I described in this post last week. P-I photographer Phil Webber could have taken the photo wherever he wanted, but the G3s provided a more colorful background than the metallic G5s would have.
I was always a little bummed that I never did find a way to wander my way through the Mac BU during my time on the MS campus. Microsoft or no Microsoft, just being around that much Mac history (both computers and software — remember, much as we love to hate them, Microsoft has been a major Mac supporter and software supplier since the Mac’s introduction) and Mac fans could have been a lot of fun, even if it were just for a tour or walkthrough.
It may be a bit late for me to peek in their doors now, though. ;)
Todd also mentioned something else that gave me a laugh — when Slashdot posted a link to the Seattle P-I’s article, a couple commenters decided to exercise their funny…
Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit: An anonymous reader writes “Today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an interesting piece on the folks who work at the Mac Business Unit for Microsoft.”
andih8u: They make software for macs and have a mac business unit. I hope someone can get some shots of macs being unloaded from a truck.
wed128: Nah…that might reveal the location of one of microsoft’s unloading platforms…any employee would be fired for an offense so great…