Learning to Love Microsoft

It's truly amazing to think of all the effort in the computer industry that has been driven by hatred of Microsoft, either at the company level (all the company consortia to free the world from their evil domination) or at the grass roots level (most recent CS grads know that Microsoft is both evil and incompetent). So what kind of fool would sign up to get people to like Microsoft better? The answer is Microsoft CVP Dan'l Lewin, and he may be crazy like a fox but he's no fool. Dan'l does a bunch of interesting things from his Mountain View office but a major part of his mission has always been to improve Microsoft's relations with the outside tech community, especially with the Silicon Valley infrastructure. He rolled out the latest wave in these efforts in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Conference in SF -- BizSpark.  BizSpark is Microsoft's answer to Amway in a sense, a network of partners (including IRG) that are empowered to offer relevant startups (yes there are rules) free to inexpensive access to Microsoft software for development and early market purposes. In the past, Dan'l built and still operates an organization that understands and nurtures external startups even more intimately but on a much smaller scale. I would guess that a lot of recent CS grads still think that Microsoft is evil and incompetent but from what we hear Dan'l has made real progress pivoting these companies at the management level. It's a nasty job but really valuable to Microsoft.