Monday, March 15, 2004
Even Microsoft's macaroni comes from Kansas
When I worked in a cheese factory in Wisconsin--yes, there are no more uncommonly cliched jobs--we sold off a shipment of cheese that had gone bad. I mean, really bad--the bags, in which the product had been vacuum sealed, had started to inflate like balloons, and the cheese inside was disintegrating into floaty bits floating in water and oil.
I asked my supervisor who might possibly want to buy bricks of cheese so rotten they had turned into toxic water balloons. He said, "We sell all kinds of stuff like that. You know that powder that comes in your macaroni and cheese? A lot of this stuff gets shipped somewhere out in Kansas, where they dry it out into a powder."
Now I'm not necessarily ready to believe that the supervisor for shipping and receiving in my tiny cheese factory knows where all the cheese comes and goes. Even so, I also learned that we'd grind up a ton of our other expired cheese and repackage it as a high-priced premium cheese. I learned a couple important lessons from my employment at that factory: you should be suspicious of any marketing strategy or corportate front that claims to be an independent entity, or does not somehow seem connected to everything else. There is no autonomy in the business world. And faithfully avoid any cheese called Party Havarti, or any incarnation of that name.
Occasionally I forget this; I'm no business person. I'm an English person, and while I am learning more about the world of business, I still rarely get a peek behind the curtains at Oz. In fact, there are a lot of Ozes we don't get a peak behind.
So thanks to Michael Hanscom, who gave us this peek behind the curtains at Microsoft. I'm not going to guess what Microsoft uses, or is going to use, PowerMac G5s for. There's a bit of speculation on Hanscom's website, and I'm sure other tech guys have detailed guesses and ideas--but I'm not going to take any shots at it here, not even for the sake of Mac pride.
It proves the point again, though--and to our uneducated eyes it looks an awful lot like being caught in bed with your arch enemy's wife.
Postscript: The pic cost Hanscom his job at Microsoft, but there are, I think, a lot of people who would tell him it was worth the sacrifice. Maybe they could pick him up as a publicist over at Apple.
(I was tipped off to this by the "101 Dumbest Moments in Business" article in the January/February '04 issue of Business 2.0 magazine. The article was a goldmine; I'll likely post other things from it as the week goes on.)
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