In early May, I was contacted by Hugh - one of my lecturers from RMIT - who had left the university some months prior. He's not the sort of person to contact an aquaintance out of the blue just to say "hi", so my curiosity was piqued before we even spoke.

He told me that he had moved to Redmond, Washington, to take a job as a software designer at Microsoft, and he wanted to "have a chat" about what they were doing. I spoke with him on the phone, and he told me a little about the work they were doing - building an internet search engine to compete with Google. I agreed to meet with him and his boss, Jim, for an "informal discussion" at a hotel in Melbourne a few weeks later, to talk about opportunites that they might have.

I went along to meet them, but had very little interest in taking a job with Microsoft. It wasn't so much the monopoistic approach, or the customer lock-in that I found distasteful, it was more that I thought they made crap software.

But we had a discussion (well, possibly more of a job interview) and Jim said some things that got me interested. Not interested enough to work for MS, but interested nonetheless. We discussed the challenges of building an internet search engine, and the approach that they were taking. I guess I had an instant respect for Jim - he was clearly intelligent, had deep technical understanding of the area, and had similar views to me about what is important in software design.

Afterwards, I had a fact-to-face with Hugh about what Microsoft is like to work for. It was clear that he was impressed with Microsoft as a worplace, and with the benefits they offered.

I went home from that meeting with a strange feeling. Was it possible that I was entertaining the prospect of working for the Evil Empire? Was this an opportunity to be involved in building real search engine? Was it unfair to label all Microsoft software as crap, just because MS Word and Windows 98 sucked so badly? Can Microsoft compete with Google on technical merit?

I was far from convinced, but the move to Redmond was starting to look like something that shouldn't be dismissed.