Video - The wonders of international business (at Microsoft)

I've worked on both sides of the Microsoft international equation - in the UK as the sub rep on various projects trying to get corp to understand the local market 'situation and challenges' and more recently in Redmond as the 'Corp' program manager acting as chief cat herder: planning, coordinating and getting 'buy in'.

This video of Microsoft's internal international 'engagement' is just a little too close to reality for comfort...like the first conf-call clip. If you work in a sub or with subs at MS, you'll know what I mean.

Update:

Other thoughts on this. Acronyms.

The acronyms that fly about in the video are all pretty much real and used almost as liberally as the video depicts (the excpetion is 'GB'). A lot are standard international jargon (LATAM, EMEA, APAC), some derive from economic roots (G7, G8, G29 - although these mean different things for different contexts within MS) and others seem to be purely MS-created (CRMG, BMO, BG, BOM, GTMs - mainly marketing). We do have an internal site 'Microsoft Acronyms' which is required reading for any MS newb. Without a read through it, you'd be completely lost in the first few seconds of most conversations / meetings / conf calls here. And that's for company-wide jargon. Each team / unit tends to develop their own specialised lexicon, though few teams are thoughtful enough to collate and share these on a site for the unit newcomers. You just have to ask. I came across a new one last week - 'ack'. It was response to a mail that I sent. 'ack' is all that came back. It's generally used, not just at MS apparently. Can you guess it?