David Weiss, a software engineer at Microsoft, wrote a blog entry giving a tour of the Mac lab at Microsoft headquarters. He says they often have press events and special visits and some people are given a tour of the Mac Lab.
They have a Sandbox, which has the significant Apple hardware configurations that will run the Microsoft products. It’s always nice to be able to test the platforms in which your software runs. For the most part you can give better assurance that your product will run on peoples machines.
From all the pictures, they have a lot of Apple hardware both new and old.
They also have a lot of tape backups. It’s always a good idea to back up your data. You never know when a disaster will strike. Tape seems kind of old for me, but a good backup solution is the one that you are most comfortable using and one that you know how to recover your data in the event of a disaster.
Mac Office is a huge application program and they need a lot of machines pooled together to build the application program. They have a lot of G3s, G4s, G5s, and a whole lot of Mac Minis.
I had been looking for a KVM for some of my setup and they said they have had great luck with their IOGear. I’ll have to check that out. It may be a great solution for me.
It must be nice having one of the Apple 30-inch Cinema Displays. I have used Apple Remote Desktop before and controlling a lot of machines requires a large screen. The 30-inch probably comes in handy when doing that task.
As far as their servers, it’s nice to see the XServe and XServe RAID systems. I have had the opportunity to use those systems in my own work and I have to say they are easy to use, reliable, and quite speedy.
It looks like it would be a good place to work. Keep up the good work David.
