I’m in Minnesota over the holidays, so I thought I’d drop in on the Twin Cities .NET User Group for a short discussion of Longhorn. Please keep in mind that this talk is purely shelfish on my part — I learn best by telling the story.

Mary Jo Foley interviews Don Box on the origins of Indigo, the status of SOAP, the definition of SOA and Miguel de Icaza. Unfortunately, Mary Jo doesn’t dig for any dirt and Don doesn’t volunteer any, so it’s a relatively boring interview. Luckily, it’s short.

In his recent visit to Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, WA, he describes what I expected to find myself:

Out of the waiting room, we stepped into an airlock. I thought the airlock was a little over the top, but figured that Microsoft knew best, so I just went along with it.

The door behind us clanked shut, and my ears popped as the air pressure in the room changed. Some vents in the ceiling opened, and I heard a faint hissing noise.

Looking up, I saw a red mist swirling below the ceiling, corkscrewing, and drooping in little wisps. I felt confused, but figured that it was only because one hemisphere of my brain had been removed in order to accommodate the borg unit.

A few seconds later, I caught a sweet smell in the olfactory glands and a tingly sensation on my tongue. It smacked of tropical punch, with perhaps just a little too much sugar.

The taste was familiar. It reminded me of some far off childhood - summers on a tire-swing, baseball at the park, and other simple pleasures. There was a common thread woven through all these events, and it had to do with this taste. This sweet, sugary, tropical-punchity flavor… It tasted like.. like…

Eureka!

So, I thought to myself, Microsoft has finally figured out how to create an airborne Kool-Aid. This is an unexpected turn of events. I wonder what else these engineers of mayhem have in store for me. What, indeed…”

Disappointingly, while the culture is very different from any other company I’ve ever encountered, Microsoft is mostly normal (mostly… : ).