The Friday Thing #696

Okay, brace yourself for a long edition….

The Friday Thing 696 picks up from last week as I began serializing our Microsoft storytelling book titled Once upon a time – The art and craft of storytelling. Our second P is Place. 

If you think about storytelling in films, it’s obvious how important place is to the story. You would not shoot a film set in space on the streets of Paris with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. Nor would you shoot a love story on planet Mars – though I am sure the latter is coming. Yet when we tell stories in other mediums we sometimes forget the power that place can have. Allow me to tell you a story to illuminate my point.

When I moved to Seattle eleven years ago, my job was mainly to help tell stories that showed how Microsoft was an innovative company through our owned channels (a blog at the time) and by talking with the media. Back then, one method we used was to invite media to visit the Microsoft HQ in Redmond and share with them all the latest and greatest things going on at the company. Often, we’d conduct these briefings in a windowless room in our conference centre. It occurred to me that maybe there was another way. My partner in crime at the time, Kim Stocks, and I dreamt up the idea of what we called an Underground Tour. We stole the name from the Seattle tourist attraction of the same name and set about creating a two-day experience where we would take the press on a tour of our large, Redmond campus. The magic of this tour was many of these spaces we took them to were rarely, if ever, seen by people outside of Microsoft – and some were not open even to employees. The early tours took people inside of the Edison Lab where Stevie Bathiche was dreaming up what was next, or the model shop where a group of craftspeople were making prototypes of mice, keyboard and Xbox controllers by hand. Over time, it grew to new spaces such as our treehouses or the expansive new Building 87 where we built all manner of devices and have numerous anechoic chambers that are the quietest place on earth.

The rationale behind all of this stemmed from a story I told a while back in edition #686. In that edition I talked about a train journey I had taken, passing the Microsoft UK office where I realized that the five grey boxes of our UK campus where a metaphor for how people saw the company. It got me thinking about what happens when you visit a friend’s house – you get an appreciation for who they are because you see what art they have on their walls, or what music they have or their furniture, photographs and more. All of these things (in their home) give context to the story of your friend. That’s the power of place.

The story I often tell to really make the point about place is anchored by this photograph. It was taken on July 29th, 2015 and here is how I tell this story. 

(photo credit - Platon)

On the far left of the photograph you can see some clouds off in the distance. Those clouds are atop a mountain range and are about 15 kilometers away. In the center of the photograph, you see Tabitha Wanjiku Kieru a pupil at the Gakawa Secondary School in Nanyuki, Kenya and alongside her, school Principal, Beatrice Ndorongo. They’re stood in the grounds of the school – a collection of cinder block buildings about 200 kilometers north of Nairobi that lacked running water. Off to their left on the far right of the photograph is a mast that has from top down, a microwave antenna, a satellite dish and then a piece of white plastic that is about 8 by 8 inches. This mast is connected to one of the school buildings where a solar panel brings power to the school and mast. All of this equipment was installed a year or so before we arrived that day in July. I say we, because this photograph was taken during a visit from Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella. You see, on that date, Microsoft launched Windows 10 – a big deal and a big day for our company. Such days are usually marked with advertisements, TV interviews, lots of media, lots of hoopla, lots of celebration and much more and we did all of those things. But why is Satya in a field in Kenya on this day? Well, a few weeks before the launch, he had suggested it’d be a moment to not only celebrate Windows 10, but also to celebrate our new company mission – ‘to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more’. So what does this photograph have to do with that? Well, that 8x8 piece of plastic on the mast is part of a Microsoft technology that was at the time called TV White Spaces (it’s now called Airband). A few years earlier, a group of local entrepreneurs known as Mawingu worked with Microsoft to install this technology at the school and in the region. Mawingu by the way means “cloud” in Swahili.

TV White Spaces was invented by Microsoft Research, and it uses the radio spectrum that historically has been used to deliver TV signals to deliver Wi-Fi. Of course, much of the TV we watch now doesn’t come over this spectrum – it’s delivered via cable or other methods. But this radio spectrum is powerful – certainly compared to the typical Wi-Fi we’re familiar with. If you think about the Wi-Fi router you have at home, it has a radius of maybe 15 meters before you start to lose the connection – an experience we’re all familiar with. Yet in Nanyuki at the time, Internet access of any kind was a rarity, so when this systems was switched on, the lives of 30,000 people in the region were instantly changed. Why? Because TV White Spaces doesn’t have a range of 15 meters – it has a range closer to 15 kilometers. Which means the people living out in those hills in the distance suddenly had high speed Internet access. It meant that the students and teachers at Gakawa Secondary School suddenly has access to The Khan Academy, Bing, Wikipedia, Google, You Tube and more. The result? Students improved their scores in every single subject on the Kenya National Exam. When I talked to the Principal, she suggested that Tabitha may be the first student from the school to go to university. 

(photo credit - Brian Smale)

A mile or two along a dirt track is this shipping container – which is in fact the local Internet café – using the same TV White Spaces technology. On the day we visited we saw kids using the PCs inside to do their homework alongside farmers looking for information about crop rotation and a local entrepreneur, Chris Baraka who was earning a living doing online transcription, freelance writing and posting for social sites.

When we finished this day in Nanyuki I sat back with friends we’d made and traveled with enjoyed a Tusker beer or two. I thought about the story we were telling and the importance of place. We’d traveled to Nanyuki to see the impact of technology firsthand. On that day, I viscerally saw our mission statement in action. To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That was it, right there before my eyes.

That’s the power of place in a story. This story could have been told from our Seattle HQ, or from one of our research labs. But the real story was out there, in Kenya. It remains the most amazing day I have had in twenty-three years at this company. That’s what great stories do – they take you to places – sometimes literally – but always emotionally. Even as I type this story that I have told hundreds of times at this stage, it still puts the hairs up on the back of my neck.

That’s our second P – place. I hope you enjoyed it. Next week, pictures – of which you have seen some amazing examples here, courtesy of Platon and Brian Smale along with an incredible crew.

As a reminder, the PDF of the book will arrive with the final post on platform.

Have a great weekend and thanks for reading.

-Steve