Microsoft Hosting Summit - WHIR Tours Microsoft Redmond Campus

• By Liam Eagle on April 18, 2008

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Last Thursday, after the Microsoft Hosting Summit wrapped up, the WHIR contingent had the opportunity to tour Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus with lead marketing manager for hosted solutions Michael van Dijken.

The tour actually began at the company's Bellevue office, just a few steps from the Westin hotel, where the conference took place.

We didn't spend much time at the Bellevue office, but we did get a chance to check out the lunchroom on the top floor which has a beautiful (dare I say, belle) view of Seattle - not to mention the very strangely enclosed immediate vicinity in Bellevue.

Over at the Richmond campus, the really remarkable thing is not necessarily the offices themselves - which from what we saw were about what you'd expect from any normal office space - but the overall scale of the campus itself.

It's probably fair to say that with a few exceptions scattered throughout, Microsoft's campus takes up about just all of what we saw of the city of Redmond (like Bellevue, a sort of suburb of Seattle). Obviously that's not entirely the case, but according to van Dijken, Microsoft currently has in the vicinity of 40,000 employees working at the campus. And according to Wikipedia, a recent census puts the city's population at somewhere in the range of 46,000. So anyway, it's close.

Another remarkable aspect of the campus is the fairly excellent job Microsoft has done building around the green parts of the city. There are trees - really huge trees, as a matter of fact - just about everywhere you look. Nice place to visit and, presumably, a nice place to work.

We spent a good chunk of our time in the Visitor Center, which provided some entertainment, as well as some of the best photo opportunities. I suppose it's a testament to my vanity that among my favorites was a picture of me, but there were some pretty amusing scenes - and it's my blog, so I suppose you'll have to bear with me just this once.

Another of the really interesting features of the campus was the "Connect" system Microsoft has in place. Because it's such a big place, the company - in an interesting eco-friendly undertaking - has set up a system of hybrid cars to shuttle employees between offices on-campus, which saves them from having to get into their cars to drive a mile or two. It's worth noting the sheer number of these shuttles. They were really everywhere, making up a sizeable percentage of the cars we saw on the streets.

Finally, we set up with Michael van Dijken for a WHIRtv interview. The full video of which can be viewed on the WHIRtv blog page.

These are just a few of the pictures I took on the tour. There are dozens more you can check out on our WHIR flickr page.

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