Microsoft has an impressive collection of modern photography in the lobby of its conference centre in Redmond, Washington. Among the artists is David Maisel whose aerial photographs of Los Angeles give a disturbing, apocalyptic, bird’s eye view of the sprawling metropolis.Black and white, teeming with a network of crazy roads, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could navigate the chaos. It seems an oddly apt choice of artwork for the world’s biggest software company.Microsoft is huge. Valued at close to $233 billion (£117 billion) it counts Windows, XBox, Hotmail and a host of other services among its products. Its sales of $60 billion are growing at 18% a year, a rate it has achieved for the past six years. Windows is published in 96 different languages and runs on 90% of the world’s computers. But for all its size and many triumphs, as analysts filed into the conference centre for their annual meeting with Microsoft’s top executives last week, what they saw was an empire in trouble.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article4406824.ece
Microsoft limbers up to fight for online future
Microsoft has an impressive collection of modern photography in the lobby of its conference centre in Redmond, Washington. Among the artists is David Maisel whose aerial photographs of Los Angeles give a disturbing, apocalyptic, bird’s eye view of the sprawling metropolis.