A new product out of Microsoft Research, Songsmith, offers the ability for aspiring singers to have a computer generate musical accompaniments to make their performance a little more more complete. Instead of using the application to launch their singing careers, a number of YouTube contributors have found a new use for MSRs new app. Taking the vocal track from a classic song (The Police - Roxanne for example) and having Songsmith create a musical track for it. Probably not what the creators had intended, the application has created a number of hilarious versions of some of our favorite songs (the aforementioned Roxanne to a groovy reggae beat perhaps). If you haven't seen these yet, follow the Telegraph UK link, they have a list of some of the more hilarious versions.

The only gripe I have with the Telegraph UK story is their interpretation that the application is "Flawed" because the music doesn't even remotely match up to the style of the song. What they don't realize, because they didn't do their homework on the application, is that the USER selects the type of music to put behind the vocals. The app is not picking these hilarious renditions, rather the user is asking to application to pair together the two things. In actuality, if you listen to the songs, I am pretty impressed how well the app matches the vocals to the new style. The tempo, beat and pacing are all good. If the app didn't work, these renditions would not be nearly as funny, as they wouldn't want.

This is not a FAIL for the application it's a WIN. The users of Songsmith are using the app to create new and creative content. Though clearly this is not what the app was intended for, its just another great example of our users taking our technology and doing awesome (even though unexpected) things with it.

This hit the web a couple days ago, and I think it is a big step for Google's Enterprise App platform.

Microsoft uses the same model to sell volume license agreements to our customers. Our partners, which internally we refer to as Large Account Resellers (LARs), are a critical component of our Enterprise sales model. This model creates a great win win for us, our partners, and most importantly, our customers. Our partners can leverage their resources to create great combined solutions that bring together the strength of our software with the hardware and custom solutions that they sell. This provides the customer with a trusted 3rd party adviser that can offer them total and reliable purchasing solutions for their entire IT department. This 3rd party can than manage the customers relationship with Microsoft (signing documents and activating benefits for example), freeing up Microsoft Sales professionals to identify areas where Microsoft technologies can improve business processes, help organizations achieve their business goals and save them money.

By adopting a partner program, Google can bring the credibility and top down solution delivery capabilities of an account reseller and combine that with components of their Enterprise Application Platform that makes the most sense for that customer and at the same time focus their internal sales professionals on up sell and customer scenario opportunities.

Though I continue to believe that Google's Applications offerings are still far to untested and feature-weak to be a true Enterprise offering, this move signals that Google is becoming more serious about its Enterprise offerings and adopting proven sales models that Enterprise level customers are more comfortable with.

- Francesco

http://photosynth.net/inauguration.aspx

Thanks to Major Nelson for the heads up on the link.

Enjoy!

 -Francesco

The article discusses a wide range of potential programs, from Public Works 2.0 - a direct injection of federal money into infrastructure projects (Roads and Bridges, Utilities, Schools and other Public Buildings) to the second half of the TARP program - direct capital infusion into banking and financial institutions to encourage the unfreezing of the credit markets. The article also discusses the possibility of tax credits/rebates, expanding subsidized college loan programs through Pell grants, foreclosure relief and other fun ways to spend over a Trillion dollars. The real question is, can any of this fix what appears to be broken in the US economy?

Let's look at the progress of current programs to date. I think we can all agree that the TARP program has been relatively ineffective. The combination of many high profile bank and financial institution bailouts (that alone had totaled over a trillion dollars, if you include AIG, at some point) and the infusion of an additional $350 billion dollars through the purchasing of almost worthless debt at rates far above market value has done little to free up the credit markets or clean up the incredibly messy balance sheets of these institutions.

It is quickly becoming apparent that for the last several years, these organizations were playing it very fast and very loose. You cannot make up for the trillions of dollars, combined, these companies made from the selling of packaged securities backed by questionable debt (car loans, subprime mortgages, college loans) and making very risky high dollar investments. While the shareholders of these companies, and many of their high level employees, were making a fortune off of incredibly incompetent business decisions - the US economy was becoming incredibly inflated by the phantom assets these banks created. The high risk and low functional value of these assets led to a fast and ugly sell off resulting in an almost overnight devaluation of an incredible portion of our countries relative worth. You could give every bank in America 700 million dollars and you could not reverse the damage that has been done to the collected wealth of this country.

Thankfully, President Elect Obama and his economic advisers have realized that focusing all of the economic recovery at the source of the collapse, the banks and financial institutions (which on the surface might seem like an intelligent idea)  will not save the economy.

Something must be done to replenish the lost wealth at lower levels - the value people lost in their homes, the steadily declining balance in the average 401k and the accumulated lost value from investments - Not to mention the toll these same loses delivered at an organizational level, forcing businesses to cut costs and jobs to make up for the loss of value from collapsing investments and decreased consumer spending.

The Obama economic team’s current strategy is interesting - start with a combination of a wide range of potential solutions and evaluate their success along the way. The majority of the money however, at least initially, will be focused on the public works program. This is where the strategy starts to lose a little bit of its strength, I think. Again, just like the Bush administrations implementation of the TARP program, it seems like an intelligent idea, probably floated at a meeting like this -

"Hey I got an idea! People needs jobs, we have money - let's pay to build stuff all over the country. It will give people jobs and we will have stuff after, it will be a visible sign that we are doing something real to help the average American!"

Yea sounds pretty great when you say it like that, but just like the economy in general, resources are scare. Allocating such a large chunk of the economic recovery package at this type of spending prevents spending in other areas. I would prefer to see more of an emphasis on helping people keep their current jobs - asset relief for some of the country’s largest employers for example - as opposed to paying to give them temporary jobs that will disappear when we stop pending so much on infrastructure.

Now I am sure many people are thinking that I am crazy, suggesting tax breaks and bailouts for big businesses when the average American is suffering. Let me be clear, I am not advocating that this be the only economic stimulus or even the most substantial part of it, however I think it is important to think about this in context. 

Let's just say for the sake of argument that there was 800 billion dollars, and that the 800 billion could be used to give every American family $1,500 cash. Sounds great right, but then what? 1,500 dollars is not going to pay your mortgage for the year or put your child through college. It is going to be a quick infusion of money, which you will probably just use to pay off credit card debt you already have. Imagine instead if you allocated a smaller portion of the money to tax cuts for us and the rest to troubled asset relief to companies that have a huge pool of US based employees. You could tie those funds to those companies continuing to invest and grow domestically in full time salaried labor growth, as opposed to the current trend of lying off full time employees and hiring part timers and contract workers, or not hiring at all.

Why do I think that this is a smarter permutation, especially when it results in less direct money from the government in my pocket? Simple - I would rather have a job then a tax rebate check from the government, and I think you would too! I think that the US economy is at its strongest when the most people in the country have secure, predictable and well paying jobs. It is not a question of how much money you have -typically large expenditures (houses, vehicles and vacations for example) are a decision based not on the amount of cash on hand but on the amount of money you predict to have this time next year, or in five years or ten. Without a more stable job pool, many Americans will be forced to hop from short term job to short term job, probably without benefits and certainly without a consistent rate of earnings over the course of a long period of time. How can you expect someone to make a 30 year commitment to pay a certain amount of money every month to own a house without being confident in their income over that course of time? 

Clearly, anyone reading this that currently has a job might be thinking that they are getting short changed here, as they would have had both – a good job and the maximum tax credit. That is a rather narrow view however, as the general weakness in the economy has lead to layoffs and cut backs at some of the countries strongest firms. The truth is, any of us could be next, and we all have to ask ourselves what is more important – our jobs or a couple hundred bucks?

It is a simple truth that our economy cannot be strong when the majority of the people in our country do not have a consistent predictable income. I do not have the answers, and do not think there is a perfect solution to this crisis. I do hope however that some thought is given to injecting some money where it will have the most effect - in stopping the prevalence of layoffs, 'full time' contract positions and decreased hiring and getting the average American what they really want, a good job.

What do you think? Any other economic recovery initiatives you think should be a focus of the upcoming economic stimulus package?

- Francesco

ZdNet, Ars, and I’m sure several others, are beginning to report on layoffs and restructuring at Google today.

Though layoffs and restructuring are nothing new in this tough economy (even Microsoft is rumored to be considering some of the same, http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1814), I wonder if this recent restructuring at Google proves an underlying weakness in Google’s ad-funded model. Though Microsoft has a varied portfolio of software and services, as well as varying business models for them (Annuity Agreements, Volume Purchasing, Subscription Agreements, Partner Driven, Ad-Funded, etc.), the majority of Google's revenue base is dependant on being able to attach advertising to their products.

The unfortunate consequence of this weakness at first seems to be its inevitable constraints on innovation. The first application groups to get the chop were ones that, while pursuing interesting or innovative technologies, could not find an effective way to monetize the product. It is interesting to note that in a world where your only revenue comes from a single source, allowing creative projects to continue is almost impossible to justify, as there could never be a business reason to continue it.

As an organization, Google has always touted itself as the company searching for new and inventive ways to catalogue and display the world’s information and to improve the global Internet Experience. It seems now, however, that there philosophy should be updated to read: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful – as long as we can find a way to attach ads to that access”.

This is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s ability to seemingly explore and innovate in areas where there is no immediate commercial viability for the technology. An entire division of Microsoft, the incredibly awesome (but rarely talked about) Microsoft Research division is a great example of this flexibility. They have a single objective – to break the boundaries of current technology. Occasionally their work makes it to prime time, either as the fundamental framework a technology can be built on top of, like in the case of Microsoft Surface . In other cases, they might release something which advances our world a little bit (or our Universe, like The World Wide Telescope) with little apparent commercial viability.

How can Google claim to be innovating in this space, when it is unwilling to support projects that cannot support an ad-funded model? Many Wall Street and Tech pundits are calling this a “Growing Up” phase for Google. Proving that they are a mature business that makes decisions based on the economic feasibility of their projects as opposed to their academic qualities. In my opinion this is sort of a jaded view. Can’t we have the best of both worlds? Since when was innovation for innovations sake and commercial success mutually exclusive?

It seems to me like it would be more “Grown Up” of Google to pursue other, non-advertising dependant sources of revenue for some of their products. The real question must be - is that even possible within their framework? I think in many ways it is not – Google’s reputation has been built on the rejection of Software + Services ("Keep it all in the Cloud - Throw Away Your OS!") and the traditional software model ("Why Pay For It When You Can Let Someone Else Pay For It Through Advertising?!").

Even if Google had the inclination and resources to engage in a more traditional software sales methodology, does Google have the right set of tools, applications and competencies to do so? Can Google credibly walk into an Enterprise customer’s office right now and say: “we can offer you a suite of Enterprise level applications, with an Enterprise level of support and a wide array of 3^rd party partners who can customize and build on top of our products to help them fit your needs. Here is how much this will cost, and it will continue to be predictable in the future.” I don’t think so, and honestly I think if you take a good look at Google’s Information Worker and Office type options, you will see there is a lot of missing qualities that prevent it from being a legitimate Enterprise offering.

In software, I don’t think there can be such a thing as a one trick pony. The extremely successful Ad-funded model for search does not necessarily extend to other applications and platforms. Either because it doesn’t make sense in the context of the technology or the types of customers that would use the technology require a more stable and predictable method of purchasing software. I think that a more diverse strategy, which incorporates multiple business and deployment models for different products, could help Google continue to innovate in areas outside of search and perhaps become a more relevant software competitor. Until then, I am confident that Microsoft's business model is far more capable of weathering economic weakness or soft sales in single market areas.

- Francesco Esposito

Take the invention of the automobile for example - clearly one of the milestone moments in human history, allowing people and things to travel greater distances in a reasonable amount of time. This simple invention however created the need to create a system to allow people to travel easily from one place to another (roads) and technology to manage and facilitate the flow of vehicles from one place to another (signals and traffic laws) and these innovations have lead to a whole other round of creative solutions - from dirt roads, to paved roads and then freeways for example. Not to mention the unforeseen consequences of these inventions that to this day are still challenges - traffic accidents, oil dependency and global warming for example.

This simple example is not limited to the creation of the automobile - think about the creation of the personal computer, which spawned the need to connect those devices (networking) and then the realization that we could bring those networks together so the worlds information and ideas could be shared in real time (the internet) which of course leads to the challenge of organizing that information (search engines, wikis and blogs). It is pretty amazing how far we have come from barely having computers connected to each other to spending the majority of our days using the Internet.

What of the unintended consequences then? I am not talking about the bad stuff on the Internet - you know like child porn, Nigerian investment schemes and anncoulter.com (yea I went there). I am talking about the fundamental problem with having all of the world’s information at your fingertips – there is just too damn much of it! Tried searching for something lately? It’s a pretty big challenge to find what you are looking for most of the time. It seems like more and more you have to have a degree in Information Sciences to do a search online. There is just too many things out there that appear to be what I am looking for and I don’t feel like our current search engine options are really trying to help us make better searches.

Do a broad search, and you will be staggered by the number of results you are presented with. For example a search for “Mobile Phone Reviews” on Live Search http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=mobile+phone+reviews produces 47,800,000 results. The same search on Google http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Mobile+Phone+Reviews produces 41,900,000 pages.

Wow, over 40 million results? Really? What the heck am I going to do with 40 million results? Let me crack a beer here real quick and get started, I might be here for the rest of 10 life times reading all of these to make sure I get to the page I want to. Hold on a second, isn’t that what these search engines are supposed to do? Read through the depth and breadth of the internet, eliminating all the pyramid schemes and NAMBLA hotlists along the way, to present me with what I was looking for in the first place? Isn't that why we invented computers and the internet anyways, to do all the hard computations and analysis we can't do?

Now as someone who has seen the explosive growth of the internet in the last 15 years, it doesn’t surprise me that there are this many pages that are related to mobile phone reviews on the internet (I am sure it is actually far more, and that Google and Live are being somewhat selective). That is not my issue, it is not with how much information is out there - it is how it is being presented to us by the very search engines that are supposed to help us navigate the Internet. Clearly, it would appear that we have crossed the threshold where the current method of crawling and spewing results based on keywords, link backs and meta data isn’t working anymore – just like dirt roads were no longer an effective driving surface for cars. What I am really trying to say is - I think it is time for someone to pave the internet, but not in asphalt – let’s pave it in relevancy.

You see, I don’t know how to search and neither do you. It’s the simple truth. Sure, there are some people out there who can craft the perfect search phrase full of w/20’s and –this and +that’s. Maybe even I could sit here for a while and try 20 different keyword combinations and find what I was looking for, but why should I have to? Can’t we come up with a better way?

Could you image driving without street signs or traffic lights? That is how I feel it is to navigate the internet sometimes. The best I can do is slam on the gas and hope I don’t run into something I don’t want and somehow get to where I want to go. So I just keep making random turns, hoping to see that place I want to be. Sometimes I find it on the second turn, sometimes on the 10th. Every once and a while I get so frustrated by not being about to find where I wanted to go that I just turn the car around and head back home. Clearly this is not the most effective way to travel and it certainly is no way to find information.

To me, It seems that the first search engine that makes it easy for me to refine my search – helping me get closer to the best information on the topic I want, in a visual and efficient way, will take the Internet to its next logical evolution and maybe just maybe finally make it the effective storage space for the worlds information it was dreamt to be, as opposed to the impossible to navigate dumping ground the current search methodologies makes me feel like it is. Machine learning and reading context from the search terms I use is a start (several search engines and search prototypes are doing this now), but its not going to get us all the way there. At some point the computer can't do all of the work. I have to help a little bit (and I am willing to do that, if it is easy and results in a set of results that are more likely to answer my query. Perhaps someone will figure it all out  and then maybe someday, I can haz relevance. We will see...

I can’t entirely explain it from a technical point of view, however there is something about Windows 7 that just feels faster than Vista or XP. An interesting note before I dive in is that I am running Windows 7 on a Latitude D620, designed for XP. Already, with a quick install and no tweaking, in my opinion it runs faster and cleaner then RTM Vista. It seems like our initiatives to improve the out of box experience is really working as the “Day 1” look and feel of the OS is cleaner and more inviting then I felt it was in the past. The install was quick and painless, and I am definitely seeing an improvement in boot times and time to restore from sleep/hibernation. These little tweaks make me feel less like I am waiting around for things and more like this PC is a device that is always ready to do work for me.

There is also a noticeable performance increase, which comes in two flavors - the first is simply put this release just runs really great. Far less hangs and pauses then you might have seen in certain scenarios with Vista. This is especially apparent when doing heavy multi-tasking. You can really tell the difference, for example, when running a refresh of a heavy Excel spreadsheet and trying to do anything else (something that both XP and Vista had a hard time with). , I am assuming the work being done to take advantage of multi-threading and multiple cores is really paying off here.

The second flavor is one that is more subtle, which is the simple efficiency of performing standard tasks in Windows 7 and IE8. Jump Lists are a much more elegant way to navigate multiple windows and at the same time keeps my task bar clean and organized. This saves me plenty of time while navigating the multiple windows I always seem to have open. IE8 takes this idea of saving you time through processes a huge step forward with accelerators, enabling you to Search, Map, Blog and a host of other convenient functions from any spot on any web page. This may not sound like a big deal, but think about the complex process you used to take when searching for a restaurant and getting its map and then look at this (Thanks to Matt Moore for the SS):

There are many more things in Windows 7 which are really great, and I will likely follow up in a later post on those. This is just really my first impressions on this great release after a couple days with it. Keep up the good work Windows Team! So I am sure you are wondering, how can I get in on the Windows 7 Beta love? Head on over to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx and try it for yourself!

-Francesco

What MACH Is:

• MACH is an acronym for the Microsoft Academy of College of College Hires. It is a two year program for SMSG (Sales, Marketing and Services Group) employees who have recently graduated with a Bachelors Degree or Master Degree. This covers most positions that hire College level employees in Field Sales, Product Marketing and Information Technology (IT). The Academy is a set of management and on boarding training courses combined with network and community building opportunities. The main objective of the program is to offer college hires the opportunity to not only onboard and start adding value to their teams quickly, but to more efficiently navigate the corporate culture and politics. In the past, college hires have had a hard time (both at Microsoft and other companies) launching their careers, as they have a small or non-existent professional network and are typically entering a large corporation for the first time. This program attempts to resolve some of these issues and while also providing college hires the opportunity to be really successful.
• The program divides hires into "classes" based on the year they joined. Since the program is International, the classes are divided regionally by area including Europe, The Middle East, Asia and The Americas. Though the majority of MACH programming events are done at the regional class levels, as far as my experience, each international "class" gets together at least once during their two years in the program, when they attend MGX (The Microsoft Global Exchange, a collection of ~14,000 SMSG global employees each year in July) and MGC (The MACH Global Conference, set a few days before MGX also in Atlanta). In addition to MGC and MGX, MACH hires have the opportunity to attend other training and networking events in their regional area. These are normally a mix of management, team building and corporate training with social events at night to facilitate networking. In addition to these on-site training events, SMSG's Readiness program has a program of "Start" trainings, which are typically more focused on your functional area or role and are delivered mostly through online courses.
• Outside of the training courses, the MACH program also offers programming and support for the business units they serve to offer support to managers and teams in developing roles and responsibilities that take the greatest advantage of the qualities and challenges a college hire might experience.

What MACH is not:

• Probably because of the college moniker, one of the biggest misconceptions about members of the program is that they are college interns. In fact, all members of the MACH program are FTEs (Full Time Employees).
• Though some teams put their MACH hires into a rotational program (the IT APEX program is a great example of this), in general MACH hires have permanent normal positions on their team like any other FTE. From a budget, payroll and headcount perspective, the majority of MACH hires are no different from the other hires sitting on the team.
• Overall, the MACH program is simply a set of programming and support for both the employee and the team they are working on to help them be more successful.

I have been a member of the program for a little over 6 months and can honestly say it has been a great experience. I have begun to build a professional and social network of people in a number of different roles, teams and in different countries. It is hard to articulate how awesome it is to be in a room with 300 other recent college graduates from 60 different companies we operate in and share your experiences and passion for technology and Microsoft with them. I would encourage any recent BA or MBA graduate interested in Sales, Marketing or IT to apply for the program at microsoft.com/college. If you have any other questions about the program, post them in the comments. I'll be happy to answer them or direct you to someone who can help. Thanks for reading!

Part 1: Pre-Interview Communication, Travel Arrangements, Etc.

In general this experience is mostly the same as you will see for any Microsoft college hire interview. You will most likely have either participated in an on-site interview at your college campus or a phone interview to 'qualify' you for an on-site. Unlike the technical interviews, where you specify what role specifically you are interested you typically initially will interview for a general area (either sales or marketing, for example). As a result you may not get any specific details about the team or role you are interviewing for until after the on-site has been offered. If you are looking for more specific information or you haven't been given any yet, this is a great time to ask. Your recruiter is there to help you be successful and will reach out to the team they are recruiting for to give you more detail on what you are interviewing for if they don’t have that information already.

Lastly, a travel consultant from Microsoft will contact you to arrange your flight, hotel stay and rental car. My only advice here is to take the full three days/ two nights that they offer. Ideally, have a travel day before and after the interview, if that is not possible, I would suggest coming 2 days before and leaving on your interview day. That is what I did and it game me time to get acclimated with the area and to be well rested. As with the technical interviews, SMSG allows their candidates to expense meals and reasonable tourism expenses. I expensed a couple nice meals and a trip to the Space Needle, the EMP Music Project and the Sci-Fi Museum. Now that we've covered the logistics, let's move on to the interview itself.

Part 2: The Sales and Marketing Interview:

Though different, the sales and marketing interview is similar in many ways to the technical interview and shares many of its qualities. The most important of these features, IMHO, is that the main objective of the interview is not to challenge you on specific sales and marketing knowledge, but to gauge your problem solving skills, ability to communicate your ideas and passion for sales/marketing and technology. It is important throughout the interview to not get nervous about your familiarity with specific sales or marketing topics, and instead to be more conscious of what you are saying and how you are saying it. It is very important to explain your thought process and to defend your logic and assumptions when making an argument or answering a question.

To test you in these areas, the interviews are split into multiple parts across multiple interviewers, so do not be surprised if you are interviewed by several people in succession with no or little break in between (I had four, one hour long interviews, in a row). Each interview will most likely be different, and they may build on each other (as others have posted, interviewers will typically send a summary email to the other interviewers and may make suggestions about questions to validate or suspect areas to investigate more fully as you are moving from on interview to the other). As such, interviewers may ask questions about previous interviewers or interviews, so it is important to keep track of who you have interviewed with and what type of questions they were asking you. It is also definitely important to stay consistent between interviews as the details of the previous interview has most likely already been shared or will be shared by the end of the loop.

In my experience the type of interviews can be divided into four interview types, though your millage may vary depending on the team and position you are going for :

The first of the interviews will be mostly about your previous experience and why you want to work at Microsoft. This interview will mostly revolve around your resume, so I cannot stress enough how important it is to KNOW YOUR RESUME and be ready to DEFEND anything on it. Especially in Business School, we are typically encouraged to use buzz-words and quantifiable/measurable statements on our resumes. Be ready to not only explain what your buzz words mean in detail, but be ready to justify or explain how you came to the measured result. For example, if on your resume it says "Project increased ROI on deliverable X by 30%" be ready to explain what Return on Investment means, how it is measured and how you increased it. If you have something on your resume you cannot explain or defend in detail, reword it or remove it. If you have 'inflated' statistics or experience, I would suggest removing it or rewording it, as it will probably not going to stand up to this level of scrutiny. As they say, the truth is better than a lie in this instance.

The second type takes the place of the technical 'white boarding' exercise from the technical interview and will ask you theoretical questions about sales and or marketing. The majority of these questions will be highly open ended (Ex. You are trying to sell product X to Y type of customer - what type of objections will they raise and how you will you resolve them or what is a product that is marketed well and why do you think so, how would you improve its marketing) and some will be more fact based (Ex: what are the differences between sales and marketing, how are they the same). I don't want to give away the farm here but some important tips for tackling these questions: 1. Take Notes, 2. Start by asking follow up questions before you start answering, the question. Make sure you understand the context of the question. 3. Put yourself in the shoes of the opposition - in the case of the first example, pretend you are the customer - what would your issues be, make a list either on paper or in your head of what those issues are, and be ready to answer them. 5. Prepare yourself to defend the logic of your arguments (how did you get to them, why did you choose them) and be ready to articulate a solution to any of those issues, even if the question did not ask you to do so. 6. Be ready to answer modifications based on your answers or thought process, for example the interview might say "Well that was a great idea but what if the product is competing with X or what if the customer has Y additional quality". The most important thing to remember though is there is no right or wrong answer as long as you can defend the logic and reasoning behind your answer. The interviewer will try to break down your argument, it is extremely important to not take this as a sign that they think you are wrong or stupid and then get nervous. Take this as an intellectual challenge and argue back, prove how smart and passionate you are! I think the worst thing you could do in the face of this type of criticism or challenge is back down on what you were defending.

The third interview type is less of an interview and more of a "fire side chat". This interview is far more conversational and I think attempts to learn more about you as a person. You may be given some questions about previous experience working with teams, what some of your goals or aspirations are at the company and in your life and may ask in more depth about specific Microsoft products or technologies you are interested in. This is your opportunity to let your personality and individuality shine.

The fourth type will typically be your last interview and is with a senior member of the team, perhaps who would be your skip level (your boss’ manager) or their boss (usually a director or higher). This interview can vary greatly depending on the person interviewing you. My only advice is to not get nervous and to try to not let the fatigue of the day hold you back here, as this is typically your last interview, it may be hour four or five of a long day. In my experience and from what I’ve heard from others, this interview usually incorporates elements from all three of the other types, but tends to be much fast and more aggressive. The interviewer has seen three or four other summaries of your interviews already so will typically expect you to answer questions about the previous interviews or interviewers and will most likely have some specific strengths or weaknesses from your other interviews so be ready. This is one of the most challenging parts of the interview process, but also a great opportunity to shine in front of a senior member of the team you may be working for.

Though it may not be possible to cover all interview types, as different interviewers and teams have different strategies, I hope this overview helps you plan and prepare for your interview more effectively. In general, have some thoughtful responses to general questions about Microsoft, its products and why you would want to work there. Review your resume and the sales or marketing basics you discuss on it and be ready to explain them. Lastly, be yourself and be confident in your responses, and let your personality, intelligence and passion shine through and you will do great. Good Luck J

The first question you might have is - so why are you throwing in your hat with the hundreds of other Microsoft bloggers? The simple answer is I think there is a lack of Microsoft employee blogs that share the experience of joining the company in Sales and Marketing and even fewer that shine some light on Microsoft's (in my opinion) awesome MACH college hire program. Additionally, I love technology and like everyone else here have an opinion about it that I would like to share with the world.

I am in the process of putting together some posts covering some of the great experiences I’ve had already, including a general overview of the MACH program, my Interview experience and The FY09 Microsoft Global Exchange (MGX FY09) and MACH Global Conference (MGC). Hopefully you all enjoy this look into the college hire experience and my time at Microsoft as I enjoy living it.