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Eric Lai's picture
Eric Lai

Regarding Redmond

Microsofties wear 'I am the empire' t-shirts: obnoxious or self-deprecating?


Ariel Meadow Stallings, the alterna-chick and Redmond employee who writes the Microspotting blog, gave away "I am the empire" t-shirts this summer to Microsoft employee bloggers.

Ariel, who could easily play singer Lisa Loeb in a movie, calls her job to "creep around [Microsoft's] campus talking to my favorite kinds of people: geeks who are passionate about what they do."

Translation: show the world that Microsoft employees are not blue-shirted, testosterone-filled drones (i.e. mini-Ballmers), but, in fact, are more like the creative/Silicon Valley/Google/open-source geeks the mainstream media fetishizes.

Sounds like a fun, albeit challenging, job. Anyway, Ariel, emulating the trendy Threadless t-shirt store, asked them to send back pix of themselves wearing the t-shirts, which are chocolate colored and made of bamboo and organic cotton. So ironic and progressive, it almost hurts!

Yesterday, she put up a collage of the photos she got back.

I am empire collage

My favorite is the guy wearing the Darth Vader helmet -- I bet it's Mini-Microsoft underneath. What do you think?

 

What People Are Saying

Look at Microsoft Salary, says everything

That Windows is so profitable that they programmers there can still earn high Microsoft salary , this is with losing money business, like Live search, etc. Think of poor Yahoo, people are leaving and surely the pay will be lower. Hopefully we can see the next IT leader soon.

Gotta love the way she

Gotta love the way she completely freaked out in her blog over you calling her cute. OMG, how DARE you.

Whatever.

Ugh. That girl is awful.

Ugh. That girl is awful. She is no alternachick. She is a middle aged, former "underground" girl who thinks that she isn't selling out bc she has blue braids or whatever.

The brown is symbolic of the Vista Operating System

At least they're admitting it.

Reminds me of the brown Zune

It is surprising to see brown as such a popular color at Microsoft, especially as it really isn't that flattering a color. The I am the empire with the darth vader helmet is funny though.

Really the only progress I am optimistic regarding Microsoft is that IE6 dies in 2009 and people pick Firefox or another modern browser ( maybe even IE8 if it has significant improvement over beta 2 ).