The Society for Technical Communication recently held their monthly meeting on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. I spent the evening pretending I was a young professional and spying out this place that some call a bastion of evil and others a spout of genius.
At first, I drove right by the entrance, an unmarked, curved road through a veil of forest. The campus itself reminded me of 3M's campus with a touch of suburbia. Newly paved roads curved past scattered buildings surprisingly restrained in both size and corporate identity. Small signs directed drivers to the numbered buildings in classy but subtle silver and granite-grey. The internationally recognized Microsoft logo, which might have been emblazoned on every reasonably flat surface, appeared only rarely, and even then small and understated—for instance, on a placard stating the regulations in the parking structure where I left my car.
Building 37, my destination, blazed the company colors only in the form of a handful of streetlight-hung banners reflecting the "I'm a PC" campaign. A security guard opened the locked glass doors and directed a woman and me to a nearby conference room. A man behind us was either wildly lost or an exceptionally poor spy, and the guard took him aside for questioning.
Inside Building 37 stood a row of modernistic, discretely serious security gates made of thick transparent doors at hip height that would retract at the flash of an electronic security badge. Beyond the gates opened a modern atrium rising maybe four stories tall involving lots of glass and balconies.
Our meeting was held in a classroom-sized space outside the gates. At the door sat a large man distributing nametags. Inside, forty of fifty people mingled around tables chatting, eating sandwiches, and asking each other where the sodas were. I found a rare open chair next to a girl about my age engrossed in text-messaging.
The presentation began with administrative announcements given by important people from a podium bearing a silver Microsoft logo. Next, there was some amount of fumbling with lights, proving once again that technical difficulties can plague even a room full of technically minded people.
The presentation itself, entitled "Writing for Mobile Devices," should have been named "Microsoft Competes in the Mobile Device Market—No, Really." It was given team-style by a programmer–writer and a technical writer, both of Microsoft, who either were married or had been working together too long. They described in broad terms the many roles of writers in Microsoft's mobile-device development process, smoothly avoiding the word "iPhone" and substituting "Bing search" for their Googley-eyed competitor. Unfortunately, Microsoft secrecy prevented them from going into the detail that would have made their talk useful. In fact, the user-assistance group (the group that writes manuals) wasn't allowed to show even their style guide to other Microsoft teams.
The one valuable take-home point: Microsoft values tech writers throughout the device development process not only as writing experts but as user advocates. That means that tech writers sit in on the design meetings when the mobile devices are being developed and are allowed to suggest, for example, that a device use icons instead of text, or an uncluttered screen instead of a complicated one, or a clearer navigational system over a confusing one, all in the name of usability. This is a newish identity for tech writers: instead of being manual-publishing machines who jump into action just before the devices hit the shelves, now some tech writers are applying what they've learned about humanity through manual writing to influence how things are designed. They hope that these new devices will be so intuitive that manuals will be less necessary.
Afterwards, one of the important people noted that the usual gift to speakers is a Starbucks gift card—what else in Seattle?—but because one of the perks at Microsoft is free coffee, these speakers got coffee mugs.
We clapped, engaged in another round of networking, and left. It looks like I'll have to wait until next time for my Bill Gates sighting.
