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Comment by k3n | Hacker News Reader

Since this is obviously a marketing piece from MS, I'll attack the delivery and not the substance (since the substance is propaganda anyways)...

But are we back in the year 2000? That header image is 936kb! And for what purpose -- to show that they're in-tune with the over-saturated photo hipsters? Seriously, the image doesn't even lend anything to the article; looks like just a generic shot of some random 'burb. I see no signs of high-tech or futurism represented. What...the.....they have another gigantic, completely useless image on each of the next 2 pages as well?

And this horrid navigation thing that slowly slides in at the bottom? It doesn't even queue (if you scroll up/down rapidly a few times the nav bar will bounce up & down several times in succession).

This might be the worst website I've seen all year.

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No, in 2000, my home connection had 64kbit. We're in 2013, where even the kind of mobile devices you'd be viewing this piece on come with 1 Mbit/s+ connections. This lets us put beautiful, high-resolution photos alongside texts, using our equally high-resolution displays for something other than sharp fonts.

Not a fan of the navigation, either.

that's redmond in the foreground and seattle in the background

Yes, but does it add anything to the piece?

The buildings in the foreground are the Microsoft campus. They show a model of some of the same buildings in the article. So it appears to be related.

Related, yes. Adds value, no.

Your axe is plenty sharp already.

It's a picture of the campus that they're talking about. Everything below the big tree line in the middle of the picture is Microsoft's campus. Note that it's not even the whole thing. The campus is huge and extends outside of the picture in every direction but north.

It's relevant because it puts into perspective how massive their campus is.

> Everything below the big tree line in the middle of the picture is Microsoft's campus. Note that it's not even the whole thing. The campus is huge and extends outside of the picture in every direction but north.

Thanks for the background! Where did you get this information (it sounds like you're already intimately familiar with it)? The caption on the image certainly doesn't convey it. IMO one shouldn't have to go to the comments section of an unrelated news site to learn the significance of a photo on your website.

I wouldn't be railing against it if it actually contributed to the article as supporting evidence (e.g. visual aide), such as if it was implemented with some sort of informational overlay, or if it was presented as a flat map (like the default Google Maps view) with labelled structures, zones, etc.

But it's not; it's just a photo lacking context.

I know this because I used to work on Windows :) Our part of the campus is (or was?) in the lower left portion. My office was just outside the lower left of the picture.

The big hole in the ground (right in the middle of the image) eventually became this: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails...

In that picture, you see the common area. The buildings on the left and right both have places to eat, as well as some shops for employees only (like an AT&T store, a UPS store, and a few others). There is also usually an art exhibit in the left building. In the background, the green field you see is an olympic (iirc) sized soccer field. In the winter, they sometimes put an ice skating rink on a portion of it.

Surrounding the area seen in that image (but not visible, unfortunately), are four new office buildings in the same style as the common buildings (but twice as tall). They're referred to as Studios A, B, C or D. One of them houses a lot of the XBox teams (and Microsoft game studios), not sure about the other 3.

The Microsoft campus is truly a marvel. It's giant, has it's own transportation system, has the world's largest underground parking garage (it's actually underneath the buildings in the image I linked above) and every day over 50,000 people come and go to it. It's a mini-city in every way.

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