Facebooks Seattle office, Zuckerberg, Gates and the Microsoft effect

July 23, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events

It was just 10 months ago that Philip Su left Microsoft, where he’d worked for 12 years, to join a the small Seattle outpost of a young company named Facebook. In October, by the time he’d finished the social networking company’s six-week training “boot camp,” he’d already developed one new Facebook feature and had settled on his next project: video calling.

Philip Su

By the beginning of July, he was standing alongside Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., announcing his newest creation: Skype integration with Facebook. Soon, he and the Facebook founder said, all 750 million people on Facebook would be able to video-chat with their friends, simply within their Web browsers.

Not everyone can use the new feature yet – Facebook is slowly rolling it out, still, over several weeks. But the fact Su was able to conceive, develop (with the part-time help of several other engineers), test and deliver a major product in just about eight months is a testament to how quickly the Facebook gears turn in this new technology world. And how different the company is from a behemoth like Microsoft.

“I myself was the only full timer that did video calling, and I think that is pretty good evidence of the amount of impact that a single engineer can have at Facebook,” Su told seattlepi.com during an interview at Facebook’s Seattle office Friday. “And that is an opportunity that I feel I’ve been given at Facebook that I would not necessarily have been given at Microsoft.

“But not because of some cultural flaw in the company, I think just fundamentally Facebook is in a different space.”

Facebook has more than 2,000 employees, about 700 of whom are engineers – making its development manpower about 8 percent that of Google’s, which in turn is about one-third the size of Microsoft engineering, Su said. Microsoft, with 90,412 employees worldwide and about 40,454 here in the Seattle area, is a different beast altogether.

Microsoft arguably is developing into Washington state’s next Boeing. Just as Boeing, through the 20th century, built out a large aerospace industry for the region, Microsoft has begun to do the same in technology. It’s the “Microsoft effect.” And companies such as Facebook are taking advantage of the area’s rich tech talent.

“I don’t think that talent has been fully exploited yet by an ecosystem of software companies the way that in Silicon Valley you have much freer flow of talent,” Su said. “So I do think when you see other companies moving up, like Zynga, like Jawbone, like a bunch of startups – Redfin is up here – like, there’s a bunch of stuff going on in Seattle.

“Software in Seattle in general is picking up, and that you will probably see more and more companies move up here, for the same reasons, because now there’s a gravity of software being done in Seattle.”

Facebook announced plans to expand into Seattle in spring 2010, and the city rolled out the red carpet. Since opening last fall, Facebook’s Seattle office, located at 101 Stewart St., has now grown to about 35 employees. Every few weeks, employees said, an open space is filled with a new row of desks and computers.

To welcome each new employee, the staff sticks a note to his or her computer monitor: “Newbie.”

The office space is small, just one floor of the skinny, brick building near the Pike Place Market. From the eighth floor, employees have an expansive view of Elliott Bay and beyond. On Friday – a relatively rare sunny day for summer 2011 – a ferry cruised in from Bainbridge Island, a cruiseliner waited at port, and out of a north-facing window, the Space Needle just peeked out from behind a Belltown condo high-rise. (See photo gallery below.)

A piece of Microsoft’s campus in Redmond. (Click to enlarge)

But no Facebook employees were enjoying the vista; they were engrossed in their work, closely examining lines of code that could soon become a new feature for the world’s most popular website. A long line of empty Zeek’s Pizza boxes lined a table in the corner that doubles as a kitchen. Friday’s lunch theme was Mexican Coke – the good stuff, with real sugar instead of corn syrup. Among other snacks, a few wine bottles sat on a shelf right above a stack of ramen-noodle packages.

“It’s a small office, I know everyone here. And so it’s really easy just to walk up to people and ask questions,” Su said. “Seattle is a pretty good slice of everything that Palo Alto does. And so instance you’ll find people here doing mobile related work, you’ll find people doing ad platform, folks work with me on chat stuff. So you’ll find a good representation of that.”

Facebook’s Seattle office is not unlike those of the other scrappy, small tech companies and branch offices that have found a new home here. Microsoft’s headquarters, meanwhile, is essentially a miniature city in the heart of Redmond. The campus is composed of dozens of building – there are 78 in the entire Puget Sound area, including space in Bellevue and Seattle – and provides amenities like restaurants, soccer fields and even a visitor center. In California, Facebook is in the process of moving from Palo Alto to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park – still small in comparison to Microsoft HQ.

For someone like Su, a transition from Microsoft to Facebook in Seattle might be shocking. But he said each company is, well, its own company.

“I loved working for Microsoft. Like, I worked there for 12 years and loved all 12 years. So, it really is a great company,” Su said. “I think when comparing a company like Microsoft’s culture to Facebook’s, it’s important to separate out a few things.

“One is just, any large organization of people versus any small organization of people are going to have natural and essential differences that are existential. Like, you can’t for instance say: ‘Look how quickly things get done here versus there. That must be a cultural difference!’ It’s not that simple. It’s subtle.

Zuckerberg

“So I do think that Microsoft, for its size, is certainly, I think, a great company. Now, Facebook is a great company on its own!”

When he started working with Skype for Facebook’s new video-calling feature, Su had no idea Microsoft would soon be offering to buy the Internet phone company for $8.5 billion. For months, he’d just been dealing with Skype – and really, he still is. Microsoft’s proposed acquisition has yet to be cleared some regulatory agencies, though the U.S. Department of Justice has given it the green light.

Microsoft and Facebook have deep ties, thanks to a $240 million investment in the social network in 2007. But there’s no special connection between Redmond and Facebook Seattle – indeed, they are certainly different companies.

Case in point: Su and Facebook decided to implement existing and proven technology – Skype – for the new video-calling feature. “Microsoft, for instance,” Su said, “would very much have the approach of (owning) the technology end-to-end, because then you could control the entire stack.

“I think Facebook really approaches this in a much more open way, because Facebook’s goal is really to enrich the Web by having a fundamental understanding of people and their connections reflected in the use of the Internet. And so because that is really the vision, to make that openness and connectedness a lot better, we know that we need to partner with people to make that happen.”

But there are intriguing similarities between Microsoft and Facebook – well illustrated in last year’s acclaimed film “The Social Network.” There’s a scene in which Zuckerberg attends a speech at Harvard University by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who exclaims that “the next Bill Gates could be right here in this room.”

Zuckerberg – who visited the Seattle office last month – is now the third-richest person in tech, behind Gates and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, according to Forbes. Worth $18 billion, the 27-year-old is now richer, for example, than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and co-founder Paul Allen.

“I do find some similarities people might not appreciate,” Su said. “For instance, Microsoft under Bill Gates, as a true geek technologist who grew up coding and whatnot, right? Mark Zuckerberg is a very technical person, and so has a very technology-focused way of seeing how the world can be made better through software.”

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