Microsoft: change the world or go home

A new poster from Hugh MacLeod - I like it a lot and plan to paste it around the building as liberally as I can and to see what Mr Ballmer thinks of it :)

Hugh gives a few explanations for which are:

  • Microsoft telling its potential customers to change the world or go home.
  • Microsoft telling its employees to change the world or go home.
  • Microsoft employees telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
  • Everybody else telling Microsoft to change the world or go home.
  • Everyone else telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
  • And so forth.

 and then paraphrases with

Basically, Microsoft is in the world-changing business. If they ever lose that, they might as well all go home

That's what I say to people a lot when they said what is my job? I work for a company the changes the world. Maybe I drank too much from the firehose but I do believe it. I spent a day with Microsoft Research last week and that continued to make prove the point to me. I know not everyone will agree that we change the world for good (I'm expecting a tonne of flak on this post) but when you see some of the projects and causes that software touches you can't help but feel humble about it. I'm hoping to help our UK citizenship team get a blog up and running soon to show you some more of this.