I had promised to comment about the interview I had with Microsoft, but before I want to clarify few things. First of all, I do not publish my interviews if the employer has specific policies enforcing limitation in such case, and secondly the content of the interview is what I had remembered from the session, and if I was not sure of something that was communicated between me and the interviewer, I did not say it. And here is my personal feedback which you wanted to know.

First of all, I never applied for Microsoft at first place, but their recruiter selected me from UCLA Bruinview which is the career center’s online job site. I did the interview for practice and to make another option open for myself.

Even though the interview went very smoothly and I was one of the first folks being interviewed, I knew Mr. Hatch would not like me for few reasons. First I made a strong example of Firefox usage in front of Internet Explorer lead manager, and it is typical that he would not appreciate me. Someone emailed me and commented that how stupid I am talking about Firefox in front of Microsoft, but the thing is if I had said Internet Explore it would have been a lie at first place, and secondly I would not be able to talk about its features that much because I have not experimented with it enough. So it was better for me to be honest in that situation. The second reason that I think Mr. Hatch did not like me for was my point of view. I have a broad point of view which makes me to see farther down the line in many years from now and see people’s needs, but his perspective was narrower than mine, and maybe that is why Internet Explorer is behind with respect to Firefox! Oops! Thus, he did not like my idea of having Firefox as the operating system. What I said was not something new. It was actually Blake Ross’s idea that I had read in IEEE Spectrum magazine which I accept it to be a realistic idea in few years from now. Secondly, creators of $100 laptop almost build a system explorer with desktop applications around browser options, so this idea has been partially implemented.

After all, it was nothing for me to lose or gain by getting an answer from Microsoft because I was not going to work for them anyway. Their business model is to make Microsoft a dominant over the world and force people to get attached to their Windows OS and other applications, but I believe that is not a right business model. You need to be able to see people’s needs in order to succeed in business, not forcing people to use Microsoft’s XPS format instead of a much more standard PDF.