Seen on the back of an African guy in Livingstone, Zambia.

[randomness]

"The most hated and feared group at Microsoft."

So I ran in front of him (okay, given the heat, I walked slightly more quickly and got in front of him) to see which group this was.

"Microsoft Exchange"

Can someone enlighten me as to the in-joke?

(I have a pretty good idea how it came to be on the back of a local guy in Livingstone.)

Comments

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

Microsoft does this thing called "eating their own dogfood". This means that they use their products long before they're really meant to be used. Exchange was notoriously shitty, and large portions of the company were required to rely on it for their email, hence "hated". "Feared" was added on to that slogan so that it made a less embarassing t-shirt.

[agrimony.livejournal.com]

Microsoft's internal mail set up is, in my experience, horrifically unreliable.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

imagine that someone, somewhere in your company, has a review goal of "get a given percentage of the company using this mail product for testing purposes, and start with the IT group because they have the charter to be our FIRST AND BEST CUSTOMER".

imagine the product is completely and totally unready for prime time, and that doing this would stress it far beyond what it is capable of dealing with at the moment. imagine that people will be without their mail for days - up to a week at a time - if you do this. and you do it anyways.

what's impressive, really, was watching the ways people came up with to work around not having functional email in a very email-driven corporate environment.

[obra.livejournal.com]

That was most definitely the internal slogan of the group when I was there in 1998-1999. I have various paraphenalia of my time there with that slogan on it, including a genuine Microsoft Exchange License Plate holder.

[xantha.livejournal.com]

we have the license plate liner too! hub and I both worked (and met) on the ex product team (neither of us works for the product team anymore).

And the dogfood description above is pretty much dead on...

There are other reasons, like the fact that the MS execs share the building with Ex, and hate Ex. They have meetings up on the top floor and gripe about how loud and obnoxious the ExTeam is. SteveB has had a few instances where he has ignored and not mentioned Ex or has misspoken about Ex in the big company meetings. Etc. Ex is/was a product team that seemed to be disliked by a lot of the other teams. :)

I had fun while I was there, but I am so glad that hub and I got out. :)

[ewin pointed me here by way of her friend ladybird97.]

[xantha.livejournal.com]

Oh and it's "feared and loathed group" ;)

[had to look it up, I couldn't figure out why it didn't sound right. :) ]