Doug Mahugh wrote up a report on his impressions of his first six weeks working at Microsoft. Says the coffee sucks. Oh, I agree! I’m drinking it right now. It’s drinkable, but that’s about the best you can say. Luckily there’s a Starbucks only a few yards from my office. But, like Doug says in his report, the other stuff makes up for the crappy coffee.

Oh, speaking of which, anyone notice that Microsoft is rarely called “the borg” anymore?

At dinner last night we were talking about just that. That Liz’s friends are telling her that Google is now scarier to them than Microsoft. She told us that AOL forced Google to start putting graphical ads on the search engine. I told her “oh, so they sold their philosophy down the river?”

Hey, Bill and Steve, now is the time to take the philosophy game over. I wrote a post in October of 2004 where I asked “what’s your product’s philosophy?”

Oh, just found this interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer over on Good Experience. She says: “We feel no pressure at all to switch to graphic ads, either internally or from advertisers.” Oh, really? Welcome to AOL!

Hmm, Preston Gralla over at CMP’s Networking Pipeline asks a more direct question: Has Google Become More “Evil” than Microsoft?

That’s not a question for a Microsoft employee to answer. But, if you find our evil, can you please send it back home where it belongs? Thanks! 😉

The philosophy question is the deeper and more important one, though, or maybe it’s the crappy coffee talking.