In the middle of very serious and often draining business trips there can be some lighter moments that inspire you and lift the mood, so that you almost forget you’re working, dehydrated and slightly jet-lagged.
In Seattle the other day I had lunch in the canteen at Microsoft, and as a would-be techie for many years this was an exhilarating experience.
The range of food available was not like your usual company canteen – it was more like a food court at the shopping mall, with a wide range of choices from salad and vegetarian food to steaks, Mexican and Asian food.
But the food was not the attraction – it was a sense of history, the history of 30 years of personal computing that hovers over the campus like a gentle Seattle mist. It was here that the geeky young men who invented Windows and brought computing to a mass global audience had lunch every day and argued about coding errors or icon design.
And also here, almost tangible, is a sense of our future – it’s here that the young women and men designing the next generation of unexpected digital experiences are tucking into their salads…..
On the way back we visited Starbucks – the original one, the coffee shop in Pike Place Market that started it all in 1971. More Seattle history….