Microsoft re-ups Microsoft re-ups (March 25, 2005)

Company’s decision to stay gives city a boost

By Jon Wiener

Once upon a time, Microsoft was The Enemy. Self-respecting Silicon Valley executives never missed a public opportunity to insult the giant software maker, even helping to launch a massive anti-trust lawsuit against the company. In solidarity, local residents flocked to use the products of other, more homegrown companies.

Times have changed.

The company’s decision in January to renew its 10-year lease on its only Silicon Valley campus, at La Avenida in the North Bayshore area of Mountain View, cemented its commitment to the Valley and the local community, and met with delight from business leaders, city officials and community groups.

"They’re an amazing corporate partner," said Mayor Matt Neely. "That’s a huge statement for our city."
Entering the lion’s den

Dan’l Lewin wasn’t looking for job. But when the Valley veteran first heard about Microsoft’s .Net initiative, a platform that enables users to extract data from the Web and put it anywhere, from their computer desktops to their cell phones, in whatever format they desire, he got interested.

"My sense was that there was a willingness for the company to be more ‘interoperable’ with the rest of the industry from a technology perspective," said Lewin, a co-founder of Next Software. Lewin now heads up the .Net division and serves as the company’s chief envoy to a Valley that once reviled all things Microsoft.

"It’s a little harder when you don’t live in the neighborhood to be perceived as a member of the neighborhood," said Lewin.

The company employs 1,100 people at its Mountain View campus. In addition to .Net, the facility also contains the headquarters for the Xbox gaming system and software development for Apple computers.

The company’s Mountain View-based competitors have, by and large, fared poorly since it arrived in 2001. Netscape, SGI and Sun have all seen their workforces decline. Others, like WebTV and Be Networks, have either sold out to the competition or dissolved in the face of it.

The company makes no apologies for aggressively pursuing industry dominance. But with the dust settled after last year’s settlement of the company’s long-running legal battle with Sun Microsystems, its attention is turning more and more to what Lewin calls "co-opetition," or cooperation with the competition. They’ve been so successful at it that many of their competitors now run on Microsoft software.

Forming partnerships with competitors was not the only reason Microsoft committed to a presence in Silicon Valley. Lewin said that the company really had little choice if it was going to recruit and hire the kind of researchers and engineers it wanted.

Doug Free, the company’s Silicon Valley public relations manager, said, "This is the center of the industry, so we need to be here in a meaningful way. It’s not that that couldn’t be moved north or south 15 or 20 miles, but we wanted to stay here."

No longer an evil empire

Though it is not too hard to find engineers who still resent the company for its corporate practices and what they think is inferior technology, it’s even harder to miss the civic leaders singing its praises.

As soon as Microsoft moved in, it set out to burnish an image tarred from the browser and operating-system wars. A Microsoft representative has been a board member of the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce’s board in each of the last five years.

When the elementary school district’s first attempt at passing a parcel tax failed in 2003, the company stepped in with a $25,000 donation to help keep extracurricular programs going. Employee contributions to the annual United Way giving campaign, which the company later matched, topped more than $5,000 per person last fall.

The company has also formed sponsorship agreements with the Community School of Music and Arts, TheatreWorks and the Friends of Stevens Creek Trail, to name a few. And it regularly opens up its conference center for events like the Mountain View Education Foundation’s annual Monte Carlo night.

"From day one, they just came in strong, offering their support to the community," said Carol Olson, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, which honored Microsoft recently as an outstanding large business. "They certainly are a model for how to do corporate citizenship well."

But the decision to stay in Mountain View means more than just continued charity for local nonprofits. It means a huge shot in the arm to the city’s efforts to bring down the vacancy rates in the North Bayshore area. And it gives the "Heart of Silicon Valley" moniker the city has adopted for itself an added grain of truth.

"You can go places and say that our community is home to Microsoft and AOL and Google -- those are all recognized names throughout the world," said Olson.

E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener@mv-voice.com

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