Tag: Microsoft Life

Building great relationships requires trust, honesty, mutual support, and appreciation. From our first conversation with designer and creative powerhouse Gavin Mathieu, there was an immediate sense of connection—one that was rooted in mutual respect and a shared goal: creating something together that uplifts others. This is why we’re proud to announce the launch of Hardwear, our first capsule collection of clothing and merchandise under the Microsoft brand and in partnership with Gavin.

Raised in South Central LA, Gavin spent years fostering community among creators like himself, including Jerry Lorenzo and Nipsey Hussle, before starting his own successful brand, Supervsn. When you spend any amount of time with Gavin, you’re immediately struck by his ability to make everyone in the room feel like family. The warmth and acceptance people feel in his presence is exactly what all of us look for in a community.

Cocreating with Gavin began with a shared philosophy. At Microsoft we often say, ‘You don’t work here to look cool, you work at Microsoft to make others cool.’ And Gavin’s thinking and history is right in line with that. With a focus on people rather than products, Gavin creates to uplift and empower others—a guiding principle and mission that drives everything we do at Microsoft. Therefore, the collection is reflective of the Normcore style, a lifestyle aesthetic that puts the focus on individuals and not on the clothing they wear.

What Gavin has designed for this collection captures the spirit of our discussions on enabling people to move and create in a way that helps them make the most impact. Gavin believes, “humans are at their highest level of self when they create.” And we believe that expression should be effortless. This is why Hardwear is simple and designed to reduce any distractions to creativity: it’s a nine-piece collection of tees, hats, sweats, jackets, and pants. Every piece is intentional, and there is meaning behind each item in Hardwear. Here, Gavin explains why he chose MS Paint as a design element for one of the pieces in this collection: Gavin Mathieu explains how Microsoft inspired him to be a designer.

While cocreation can be messy, this partnership brought with it a sense of ease. Maybe it was because we all leaned into the often complex and sometimes challenging process that happens when creating with passionate individuals, who all have unique suggestions and differing opinions. This collaboration was fueled by openness, vulnerability, and the belief that often the most resonant ideas are built from the inclusion of diverse perspectives.

For Hardwear, our community was a team of people who made strides daily, building each other’s confidence by having honest conversations and creating space for suggestions and improvements. This campaign tested our comfortability and challenged us at times, but what pushed us forward was seeing the inclusion of diverse voices throughout the process and the unique perspectives on what drives those who want to improve themselves and the world around them, as well as what can distract people from progressing toward their goals.

It’s important for us to work with creators who are focused on inspiring communities and making a positive impact in the world, because enabling and empowering people to achieve more is what drives everything we do at Microsoft. And with Hardwear, it’s as much of the how as it is the what. From the talent of our people to the capsule collection launch, to the diversity of those behind and in front of the camera and our agency partners, cultural nuance and perspective are the key ingredients that make this a collection we’re proud to share with our own communities.

As we worked on this, Gavin encouraged us to broaden the aperture for who we define as a creator. All of us create. So, check out the collection, but don’t stop at the clothes. Understand and carry the message that creativity is not on you, it’s in you, and it knows no bounds.

Is it breakfast or cookies? Either way, Roxie (@RoxStarBakes on YouTube) has us chomping at the bit for these adorable creations!

Breakfast-shaped sugar cookies

1 c unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 c sifted powdered sugar
1 egg, at room temperature
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
3 c sifted flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Gel food coloring: yellow and red (white is optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Using a mixer on medium speed, cream the butter and powdered sugar until they are fluffy and white. Scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl at least twice during this process. Switch the mixer to low speed, and add the egg and the vanilla.

3. In a separate bowl, combine the sifted flour, the baking powder, and the salt.

4. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients one-half at a time, using the mixer on low speed. Mix until everything is combined.

5. Divide the dough into four portions. Leave two portions white (plain), and color the other portions yellow and red. Roll out each portion on a cutting board to about 1/4 inch thickness. Cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Remove the dough from the refrigerator. Let’s start assembling!

6. To make an egg, use a large circle cookie cutter to cut a circle from the white portion of dough. Use a smaller circle cookie cutter to cut a smaller circle from the yellow portion of dough. Place the small circle on top of the large circle, and you have an egg!

7. To make bacon, place the white portion of dough on top of the red portion. Use a knife to cut the dough into three pieces, and stack them on top of each other with the colors alternating. Slice down through the stack of dough, making bacon strips. Press your fingers on alternating sides of the bacon strips to make the edges squiggly.

8. Continue making cookies, and place them at least 1-inch apart on a baking sheet that is lined with parchment paper. Cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for another 30 minutes.

9. Remove the cookies from the refrigerator, and bake them for 8-10 minutes. Let them cool before serving.

*****

A former competitive surfer, Rita took up the sport when she was 14. Back then, few females surfed in Portugal, she explains.

“When I’d find another girl on the water with me, it was instant friendship.” But being one of the only girls in the waves was hard. Other surfers told her to get out of the water, to go home.

“Why shouldn’t I be out there?” she remembers thinking at the time. “I’m entitled to learn just as anyone else. It looks fun, and it is fun, and it’s what I wanted to do. I just stood up for myself. But it wasn’t easy.” [embedded content]Click here to load media

Rita taught herself how to surf by practicing on her bed, but she soon became so dedicated to surfing that she went pro, becoming a pioneer for women in the sport.

And yet, she was always humbled by the sea. “The ocean can kick your behind. You try and you try, and you can’t. And then you try and you try again, and you still can’t. But then the first time you catch that wave, and you ride it unbroken. . .”

She sighs as she looks at the horizon. “I can’t even describe it.”

*****

On land, Rita shows just as much determination. A planner who calls herself “by the book,” Rita knew from an early age that she wanted the freedom and security that a good paying job could offer. Plus, she wanted to see the world. So, she applied herself, and she studied hard.

So far, it’s worked out: her life has taken her to live and work in Seattle, Paris, São Paulo, Miami, and Madrid. “Mostly importantly, I was doing the things I loved: talking with new people and sharing experiences with others,” she says.

But Lisbon is home, and a big reason she lived in all those cities so was to get the experience she needed to land what she calls her dream job as chief financial officer for Microsoft Portugal.

*****

Microsoft 
Lisbon, Portugal

“It’s because of Rita.”

Just as I’d heard, Rita Picarra is ubiquitous, almost legendary, in the hallways of Microsoft’s Lisbon office. Many employees are quick to credit Rita for helping them grow and make a difference in ways they never imagined.

“Bluebell is in a disadvantaged area, and when I have kids come in from similar areas, I always tell them where I’m from. And they’re like, ‘No, you’re not!’” she says. “Because to them, seeing someone from Bluebell working at Microsoft is a big deal. And I just hope that they think, ‘If she works here, I can work here.’”

After a recent class, a student thanked Amanda and told her that she’d only seen men code before. The chance to code alongside other girls was something she’d never imagined.

“That was a ‘whoa’ moment for me.” Amanda pauses and then sighs with disappointment. “Of course, I know the statistics about women in the tech industry. But to actually have a student say that made the reality and the impact so much more real.”

In the next year, Amanda hopes to reach more students through DreamSpace by traveling to rural areas, training more teachers, and even creating mini-DreamSpace environments at schools—colorful and comfortable corners within classrooms where students can learn together.

“I firmly believe you can’t be what you can’t see,” Amanda says.

“I want to show students that it doesn’t matter where you live. It’s doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter what your parents do. You can do this; it’s possible for you.”

*****

Back at Colaiste Pobail Setanta, Amanda hugs her former coworkers good-bye and heads out of her old science lab. As her hand swipes an empty student desk, she thinks lovingly about the past. She loves what she does now—growing her own skills in new ways—but she’ll always remember where she came from.

Making her way to the exit, Amanda walks past the front office receptionist—a new employee who didn’t work there when Amanda was a teacher at the school.

“Hello, I’m Amanda. I used to teach here.”

“Hmm. What do you do now?” the receptionist asks, assuming Amanda has left the vocation as well as the school.

“Oh, I still teach,” she says, her face lighting up with pride. “But now, I’m a teacher at Microsoft.”

*****

Inside the gleaming white storefront, Khulile picked up a doll to show a customer who wandered in off the street in Ferndale, a suburb of Johannesburg, where the shop is located.

Sibahle Collection, which started in Khulile’s garage in 2017, quickly grew into this shop, where she transferred the business in 2018.

The doll, dressed in a bright orange and yellow print with small black polka dots, had a skin condition called vitiligo, which causes the skin to look patchy. The woman touched the doll with fascination, looking up at Khulile with soft, sad eyes.

“Do you know what this would have done for my self-esteem, if I had grown up with a doll that looked like me?” she said to Khulile.

*****

Though the mission of Sibahle Collection is for every child to grow up aware of the beautiful and rich diversity that the world has to offer, the beginning of Khulile’s story didn’t start with every child. It didn’t even start entirely with her own child.
It started when Khulile herself was a child.

Every morning in the township of Newcastle, several miles south of Johannesburg, Khulile would wake at dawn. She’d stoke the coal fire to warm up the house and place a concrete brick into the fire. Then, she’d wrap the brick in newspaper and hold it close to her body to keep her warm in the bitterly cold Newcastle winter, while she walked to school.

One morning, as she stood outside holding her hot brick, she turned around to take in the rows and rows of impoverished homes in the low-income housing where she lived. Smoke poured out of the roofs, each warmed by a coal fire just like hers. Suddenly, Khulile caught the faint whisper of fate on the wind, as sure and silent as the gentle snow falling around her.

“This isn’t your destiny.”

At that moment, she knew it. She wanted something other than what life had handed her. And she would go get it.

*****

Khulile was raised by her great grandmother, and then her grandmother when her great grandmother passed away, because in her culture a child who was born out of wedlock could not go live with her mother’s new family if the mother married.

“My mom was about to marry my stepdad. She had no choice but to leave me behind, as dictated by our culture” Khulile said, shaking her head in disapproval.

She pushed herself hard in school—harder than anyone else she saw. Education became the vehicle she’d use to usher in her bright future.

Adonis grew up at Taos Pueblo, but his parents sent him to school in Tucson when he was transitioning from middle school to high school. Every summer, he’d return to Taos Pueblo and fall in love with the land more and more.

But spending the school year elsewhere gave him a different perspective when he returned. He wanted to do something with the skills he was gaining every year to help Taos Pueblo keep growing and thriving. This desire eventually solidified into his life’s purpose: to serve indigenous communities. What wasn’t as clear was how he’d do that.

His path led him to graduate school to study business, with the idea that a business degree would provide many useful tools and bring multiple opportunities to fulfil this purpose.

During his time in grad school, he worked on a project for Microsoft and was introduced to one of the project sponsors, Mike Miles. Mike was just putting together a new team at the company, now the Talent Workforce and Community Development Team, whose goal was to build and nurture relationships with the local communities that hosted Microsoft’s datacenters. Adonis took interest in the project because he observed a genuine interest in the company to create meaningful and long-term impact—something that at the time was counterintuitive to his perspective of corporate America.

Over a few months of working with Mike, who Adonis describes as a visionary and authentic leader, Adonis began to soften to the idea of corporate work, especially if it meant he had a way in to develop relationships with local and potentially native peoples. A year later, he started working on Mike’s team.

In addition, Adonis has taken a voluntary leadership role to organize with a group of indigenous employees who work at Microsoft to create their own official employee resource group inside the company.

“I see myself building on top of all of this work to continue to serve indigenous peoples,” he says.

Brittany has always been driven by her career, she explains. During college in West Palm Beach, she ran multiple student and community activities. Then she moved to Chicago and worked in marketing and events at a publishing company and a tourism group. By age 25, her professional achievements were mounting, fueling her growing ambition.

“I was working 60-hour weeks in a big city, and it never felt like work,” she says, laughing knowingly at her younger self. “I thought I was invincible.”

And then, she was contacted by a recruiter. Did she want to lead local community programs for a new Microsoft retail store in Miami? It was the career move she’d been waiting for.

Three weeks later, Brittany received the job offer, but then her life took a twist.

She found out that she was pregnant—and was immediately overcome with doubt and ambiguity.

“I thought that if I wanted to raise a family, I couldn’t be a working mom,” she says, her cheery voice turning suddenly serious.

The decision felt especially fraught for her, given the culture in which she was raised.

“My dad’s side is Cuban, and my mom’s side is Puerto Rican. People from cultures centered on family like mine often particularly struggle with the guilt from wanting both,” she explains.

She was tortured with questions: “Will I get to spend enough time with my kids? Will I be able to devote enough energy to my clients? My baby will only be little for a short time. . . . If I take a break from work, will I be able to pick up where I left off?”

Even though she was uncertain and scared, she had a village around her and decided to make the leap. She took the position as a community development specialist with Microsoft and helped open the first Microsoft retail store in the Miami area.

Well, the interns at Microsoft sure had fun this summer.

While there may be a documentary coming to Netflix that dives deep into what makes Bill Gates tick, the release of “Microsoft the Musical” on YouTube on Friday clearly shows what makes heels click at the software giant he co-founded.

The 8-minute number, which took us about that much time to convince ourselves it was in fact a real thing, features singing and dancing software engineers and data scientists clad in primary-colored clothing. The whole thing is the work of 150 people, including interns and employees.

A description for the video on YouTube is written by Liam McGregor, a data science intern credited with directing, producing and helping to write the musical.

“‘Microsoft the Musical’ was dreamt up and led by interns spending the summer of 2019 at Microsoft,” McGregor wrote. “This Tony Awards-style musical theater opening number is just one of many passion projects that came to life because we were encouraged to bring our whole selves to work. And that’s what we did: 150 people came in on mornings, weekends, and nights to create this outside of (and in addition to) their day jobs.”

After opening with a nod to Gates, cast members dance across the company’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters campus and throughout buildings. A whole host of company accomplishments and product names are dropped throughout — Windows, Office, PowerPoint, Surface, Xbox, HoloLens, Minecraft, Azure … even Clippy gets a mention. And the lyrics, posted in full here, also manage to poke some fun (sorry, Windows Phone):

It’s all happening here…
The standard for your office and your home
All happening here
All around the world our products are well-known!
Except for when we tried to make a phone!

“It’s all happening here,” is the constant refrain from the chorus. And while it sure does appear that being an intern at Microsoft affords young people the chance to work on some cutting-edge stuff, a break in the music does lay things on a little thick, as two characters are shown chatting in a company cafeteria.

“How is it that everyone here does so much,” a woman asks her co-worker at the 5:25 mark of the video.

“I know. I don’t get it. Maybe there’s something in the water,” the man replies.

“May I please have a latte and … an extra shot of whatever ingredient it is that makes people here so successful?” the woman says as she orders a beverage.

Alas, there is no special ingredient, because everyone brings their own! Back to the singing and dancing!

“Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” McGregor wrote in his director’s note. “We hope that this speaks to every person who dreams of being part of something big — and especially to those who’ve been wrongly told they can’t be. At some point, we were all in your shoes. You CAN, you SHOULD, and you WILL.”

Here’s a list of credits for those involved in the production, as it shows up on YouTube — along with their titles for jobs they held at Microsoft in the summer of 2019:

• Produced and Directed by … Liam McGregor (data scientist intern)
• Written by … Liam McGregor (data scientist intern) and Trip Master (explorer intern)
• Executive Produced by … Diego Rejtman (GM, global university recruiting) and Sacha Nunn (culture program manager)
• Choreographed and Co-Directed by … Swetha Prabakaran (explorer intern)
• Protagonists (in order of appearance) … Ryan Hecht (program manager intern), Leslie Richardson (program manager), Alyssa Raqueno (explorer intern)
• Bill Gates, the idea … Eleanor Lewis (software engineer intern)
• Composed by … Joshua Yang (explorer intern), Trip Master (explorer intern), Liam McGregor (data scientist intern)
• Orchestrated and Conducted by … Peter Yang (software engineer intern)
• Director of Photography … Stephen Hitchcock (software engineer)
• Sr. Production Manager … Morgan Dukes (marketing intern)
• Associate Cinematographer and AD … Rishi Raj (software engineer)
• Assistant Choreographer and AD … Lizzy Lee

On his first day at Microsoft, Phillip was taken to lunch by his manager. Bussing his table after the meal, he approached three bins labeled compost, recycle, and trash. He’d never been exposed to compost, much less this kind of container array for waste.

Phillip: “This is just for food? I’m going to need a second.”

Manager: “No worries, everyone has a difficult time sorting their waste.”

This got some sprockets spinning in Phillip’s head.

Phillip also began seeing signs for Microsoft’s 2018 Hackathon, held in July. The company-wide event encourages employees to work on new ideas they have to change the world. Phillip was one of more than 23,500 global participants that year. Phillip had an idea for an artificial intelligence solution to help people sort their waste. The project uses a camera to recognize waste items and cue the bearer, likely with an LED light, as to which bin each piece belongs.

Others who have attacked the problem have typically focused on automating the process. But it was important to Phillip to include an educational aspect—in essence, teaching a machine to teach humans how to sort waste.

Two Rubik’s Cubes sit on Phillip’s desk at Microsoft. One is the traditional shape, and the other is shaped kind of like the Death Star in “Star Wars.” A blueprint of the first one—the original cube—hangs on his wall. He has solved the rotating brain teasers so many times since middle school that they now offer a kind of automated mindlessness.

He says he uses that state to unleash his creativity, something experts say otherwise cannot be summoned on demand.

“It’s a way of broadening the current range of sense experience,” he says. “Specifically, for me, it activates other creative ideas when I’m stuck on a challenge. “

The first real puzzle Phillip tackled, so to speak, was his inability to earn a way onto the North Dallas Cowboys select football team in fifth grade.

“Getting rejected took an interesting toll on me,” he says.