Earnest Money Microsoft: Fill & Download for Free

The PayPal scam continues. Yesterday, I listed a very high end laptop/tablet (a new Microsoft Surface Book 2) for a friend. Even though the ad warned scammers to stay away, 15 minutes after listing here comes the PayPal scam.The scammer offered $150 over asking if I would ship to a Miami address. The full price plus bonus will be paid directly to my PayPal account.So where’s the scam? It’s in the hook that comes AFTER I say yes and supply my PayPal information: Oh, we’ve deposited the money in a PayPal escrow account and the money will be immediately moved to your account the moment you give us the tracking number for the shipment. The email included a screen shot of a logoed, authentic-looking PayPal account showing the money deposit.Folks, there is not such thing as a PayPal escrow account. The screen shot is totally bogus.You have two choices when this scam hits you:Turn your back and simply disregard it, knowing that the scammer is anxious to hear from you and it isn’t going to happenPlay along. Yesterday, I responded by telling scammer that I’d ship to a relative in Miami and he could simply drive over and buy it, no bonus or shipping charge needed. But, first I needed to have the buyer make an earnest money deposit into my PayPal account to prove his seriousness before I ship.What do you think the scammer did? The first bullet!

I worked at Microsoft for 6.5 years. I also love learning about tech industry corporate cafe food. So I will answer your question in far more detail than you may have wanted.(And my apologies if any of the hard-working MS dining folks read this and are offended by my feelings here - I do respect your work and good intentions tremendously.)If you compare Microsoft’s current food to your college dining hall, it’s probably pretty decent.If you compare Microsoft’s food to any of Microsoft’s peer companies in our industry (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc), it’s sorely lacking. But most Microsoft employees probably won’t consciously mind the difference -- or if they do, they probably won't admit to it.Why is Microsoft’s food inferior to Silicon Valley companies? In Silicon Valley, gourmet-quality food originated as a tool to recruit new employees in a phenomenally competitive job market, to keep morale high for engineers who are frequently courted by neighboring competitors, and to incentivize engineers to work late on a daily basis. These are needs that generally aren’t quite as transferable to the Seattle-area job market.At a high level, I believe Microsoft has comparatively inferior food because of three recurring and pernicious cultural habits:Microsoft tends to copy the surface-level characteristics of its competitors, without fully appreciating the depth involved in doing something right.Microsoft employees are conditioned to be grateful for what they have (even when it’s crappy), and not complain about things that are orthogonal to the business.Microsoft doesn’t value gratuitous excellence, and can settle for “good enough” unless there’s clear competitive pressure. (“If you can’t make it good, make it look good.” - Bill Gates, 1981)The key difference between Silicon Valley and Microsoft foodIn Silicon Valley, the Bon Appetit Management Company essentially pioneered the concept and business model of providing high-quality, sustainable, healthy corporate cafeteria food in the 1990s, under Fedele Bauccio's leadership. They now run nearly every famous tech dining facility in the region, and along the way, have pushed for fundamental supply chain changes in animal husbandry and social responsibility.One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple in 1997 was to fire their food vendors (Guckenheimer) and bring in Bon Appetit. Steve also recruited a prominent chef from Steve's favorite Italian restaurant (Il Fornaio in Palo Alto) to run the Caffe Macs dining facility.Microsoft, on the other hand, has never used Bon Appetit. They’ve stayed with a company called Eurest, which brought a distinctly different (and more conventional) approach to food service.When I first came to Microsoft in 2008, what struck me the most was just how incredibly, unbelievably horrid their food was — and the extent to which nobody seemed bothered by it. Everything was served (and largely still is) with disposable silverware and on paper plates.I’d literally never seen anything this bad in Silicon Valley: lunch primarily consisted of burgers, pizza, calzones, and various other quasi-junk food products that were cheap and easy to make. The soups all came right out of cans. The salad dressings were premade. There were high-margin Frito-Lay potato chips and other junk food for sale everywhere in the cafeterias - things I'd never seen at places like Apple or Google. Even when I biked 100 miles a week, I couldn’t lose any weight eating that stuff daily. At one point, my doctor even referred me to a nutritionist and warned me against continuing to eat it.Whereas Steve Jobs ate all the time in Caffe Macs and expected the food to be excellent, our executives rarely appeared in person in our cafeterias (I presume they had better options.)Here’s an actual Microsoft lunch from that era: the "Kung Pao Portobello Philly with Napa Slaw" (aka: "human vomit on a hotdog bun”).As one of my friends, an engineering manager at Apple, quipped on Facebook about another lunch, “It's so cool that Microsoft will make fresh-cooked meals for your dog":In contrast, here are samples of what lunch at Apple's Caffe Macs looked like at that time:So, a bit of a quality gap, eh?Since then, Microsoft has made an earnest effort to upgrade the food to be more in line with industry peers. They’ve made dramatic improvements. But I would argue that the food is still materially inferior to competitors' cafeteria food — and my belief is that it’s because of the 3 pernicious cultural habits mentioned above.#1: Microsoft tends to copy the surface-level characteristics of its competitors, without fully appreciating the depth involved in doing something right.Microsoft indeed invested in building beautiful new cafeterias. They've created the surface-level characteristics of a modern tech cafe, with incredibly well-thought out environmental design. But much of the food has not been materially improved - just more attractively presented, and in nicer surroundings.Healthfulness. Food in Silicon Valley cafes is often healthy because engineers are too busy to cook, so engineers often eat at their corporate cafe to reclaim time. First-rate cafeterias like at Apple exist as a productivity booster. They make it healthy and sensible for you to eat at work meal after meal. Apple's breakfast menu includes breakfast salads, actual fruit smoothies, and lots of options you could eat regularly without harming your health. But that's not the case at Microsoft’s cafes.If you look at Microsoft’s breakfast menu, it is overwhelmingly foods that are terribly unhealthy for you to eat daily — you can’t easily go there for breakfast daily as a time-savings, unless you could order the one or two healthy entrees almost every single day without going insane. While it superficially resembles a Silicon Valley cafe, it misses the fundamental end-user need of enhancing productivity by saving your employees’ time, and preserving their health.Similarly, lunch in my cafe - one of Microsoft's flagships - remains primarily a presentation of cheap-tasting meat with some sides. And it still cost nearly 8 bucks!Whereas I could go vegetarian at Apple’s or Google’s cafes very easily and love every healthy vegan meal, Microsoft’s vegetarian options are generally second-class products (e.g. replacing a piece of meat with a hunk of tofu) — and for the same price. So Microsoft unfortunately incentivizes people to choose unhealthy food, despite having what I believe to be the best nutritional labeling system (based on the Harvard Healthy Plate model) of any corporate tech cafe I’ve seen.Quality. Google serves (really good) restaurant-quality sushi in their cafeteria. Microsoft can boast that they now serve sushi, too. It’s literally the worst sushi I’ve tasted in my life. My local chain supermarket likely sells better sushi. One of my coworkers literally just threw the whole thing out after he tasted it.In other words, the food is often of variable quality - there's no reliable baseline of what you'll get. And often, the quality can be exceeding low.Sustainability. Google is well known for using the purchasing power of their food services to jumpstart a sustainable and ethical food supply chain around the Bay Area, rather than to just present inhumanely sourced food products in nice-looking cafes.While Microsoft sources some produce from local farms, they have never (to my knowledge) used their food services to take a firm and public stand on sustainable and humane agriculture. To the best of my knowledge, Microsoft just serves the same inhumanely raised, factory-farmed animal products as before, but in nicer-looking venues.Facebook, for example, is known to source a clear majority (about 75%) of their food from organic farms. Microsoft seems to tend more towards gimmicks like having leafy greens growing in the cafeterias hydroponically (which one of my friends observed being “harvested” by being thrown right into the garbage).Top leadership commitment. At Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox and so many other Silicon Valley companies with great food, the executives are personally invested in having great food. At Apple, Steve Jobs personally restructured the cafe in 1997 as one of his first activities as iCEO — even when the food served then was arguably already far better than what Microsoft serves today. At Google, Larry & Sergey personally oversaw the choice in hiring Chef Charlie by organizing a big cook-off.And at Facebook, the tragic and premature death of Chef Josef in 2013 rocked the company, with tributes shared by hundreds of employees. Mark Zuckerberg himself announced the terrible news, calling him a “legend” and “institution”.All these stories reveal a culture around appreciating the cultural value of great food - something that never was part of Microsoft’s DNA. Could Satya Nadella even name any of the main chefs on campus, let alone write a sincere and touching obituary for any of them from memory? I would be shocked.Correspondingly, I don’t believe Microsoft pays the bucks to bring on top-tier chefs, and the ingredients they use feel to be fairly low-end. If you walk through a typical Microsoft salad bar and compare it with an Apple salad bar, the presentation may look equally attractive, but the contrast in quality and caliber of the food is material.#2: Microsoft employees are conditioned to be grateful for what they have (even when it’s crappy), and not complain about things that are orthogonal to the business.When I briefly worked at AOL West (the remnants of Netscape) and the penny-pinching Dulles headquarters replaced our Bon Appetit facility with food of similarly poor quality to Microsoft’s, it just took a few days until the entire company literally stopped using the cafeteria and started eating out with their coworkers. Ultimately, Bon Appetit was brought back.At Microsoft, the culture unfortunately feels predisposed towards tolerating broken things, and of discouraging employees to complain about anything that feels orthogonal to the business. At Google, I understand that employees actually complain when the food isn’t good enough, and they actually expect it to be improved.#3: Microsoft doesn’t value gratuitous excellence, and can settle for “good enough” unless there’s clear competitive pressure. (“If you can’t make it good, make it look good.” - Bill Gates, 1981)At times, Microsoft can unfortunately settle for what’s convenient and “good enough”, rather than insisting consistently that everything be outstanding. The food culture is simply a reflection of that broader corporate culture.What does a commitment to "outstanding" look like? Consider sushi at Apple. The sushi chef in Apple’s cafeteria is Steve Jobs’ favorite sushi chef, Toshi Sakuma, who ran the critically acclaimed, high-end Kaygetsu sushi restaurant in Menlo Park. When Toshi was ready to sell his restaurant, Steve personally invited him to join Apple and make sushi at Caffe Macs full-time. (I presume he was also paid a sufficient enough of money to make it worth his while, but I don’t know this for a fact.)At Microsoft, they bring in chefs from local restaurants as well. But you'd never hear a story of Satya Nadella recruiting a top chef to make a new home at Microsoft. Instead, we get restaurants like Shanghai Shanghai, which made literally the worst Chinese food I’d ever tasted in my life - it was even worse than the fast food Chinese in my small Dutch town. It had deservedly horrible ratings on Yelp. They appear to have shut their restaurant down, and now prepare Chinese food full time at Microsoft.Similarly, all the “local restaurants” featured in the Microsoft cafeterias I’ve seen appear to have been commercially mixed or have fairly mediocre ratings on Yelp. (I also don’t know for a fact, but I presume that Microsoft simply is not willing to pay enough money to make it worth the while for higher-end chefs to cook for the company.)To conclude, overall, I would argue that the food at Microsoft is no longer objectively ‘bad’ — a hard-working and dedicated culinary advancement staff has improved it remarkably.However, it remains far below Silicon Valley standards for underlying cultural reasons that appear systemic at Microsoft, and feel unlikely to change unless its broader culture changes.

As with the girls, its hard to pick one best-looking guy, and since looks are usually not as important in boys as they are to girls, I’m taking into account those boys who had gorgeous faces and bodies, charismatic personalities, and a “presence” among the popular boys in school.The first I’ll call David. He was our prom king, honor student, rowed crew, and was this perfect vision of the 1980s preppie ideal. He dated the Homecoming Queen, a smiley, baby-faced girl who carried herself with this elegant dignity. “The kind of girl I want to marry someday,” is what the boys said about her. They were very cute together, again, like an 80s movie, but went their separate ways after graduation — David to Stanford and Karen to Brown.At Stanford, he also rowed on the crew team while getting his degree in computer science. After graduation, he came back to Seattle to work for Microsoft, eventually reaching a director position. He retired from that, spent some time sailing the world in his boat, and found a new wife. Now, he has a well-funded startup that makes some newfangled coffee-brewing machine, aimed at those people in the market for a $1500 coffeepot. He’s not that handsome anymore, he’s a little fat and bald, but his charming smile remains. Not sure, but I think he’s divorced.The second was this French kid named Michel, who attended private school in Switzerland before his family moved to our town. Both he and his sister were extremely attractive and exotic, but this Michel kid was a true dreamboat. Dark hair, glittering black eyes, charming as all get out. You’d think he’d be a player, but behind his suave Swiss facade, this kid was extremely idealistic and earnest. He dated many of the school’s most desirable girls — it was kind of an achievement to have a fling with him — but he never got serious with any of them. He was also really smart, one of our Valedictorians, who chose to deliver a joint speech with a shy, nerdly guy who later became the editor of TIME Magazine in India.Michel went to Princeton, and then Harvard Medical School. Now, he lives in a small mountain town in Washington, where he serves as the only doctor for the area. He’s still gorgeous and even more attractive, because he didn’t pursue money. (I think his family has some, they live pretty well and take exotic trips on the regular.) Judging from the throngs of women around him at the reunion, I think he could still have any girl he wanted.