It’s been a strange few weeks in a very strange year. Microsoft ended my job and most jobs on my editorial team at MSN in July, but they let us all hang around for a few weeks to seek out new gigs. So I hit 20 years in late August and then said farewell in September.
My latest here, The Glimmer in Team Room 2216, is actually inspired by 20 years in the tech world and covering business, which began just in time for the great dot-com bust. I use the lingo of startups and dev ops and the like, and citem workplace issues like office vs. open space.
Most directly, when we moved into my last office at Microsoft, there was a mystery room you couldn’t book for meetings that presented only a door knob that wouldn’t turn. (Note to corporate security: you only had to pull the handle to get in, and many used the room. Don’t zap me.) There was a wall full of code, the origins of which remain unknown, and which by now has been erased
The executives that drive the story come not from Microsoft, which actually builds things, but from the upstarts who were so prevalent around Seattle at the turn of the last century. The folks who drew tons of seed money to some wedontreallymakestuff.com company, which maybe went to an IPO before going broke,
They didn’t give the money back, and probably went on to make up some other venture. A few, perhaps, really did have an idea that would have changed world, had it not gone up in the crash.
Or at least, a glimmer of such an idea.
Ron Prichard's Fictions and Fables 