Bringing together a worldwide vision
SeattlePI | at | by Mike
The meeting attended Friday afternoon by Microsoft Corp. Group Vice President Jeff Raikes was, in some ways, like many others. A group from outside the company presented Raikes and his team of executives with a series of suggestions, including one for a new product, and promised to follow up with a formal proposal outlining how they might work together in the future.
But this was no ordinary meeting.
The people making the presentation were 15 university students from around the world, brought by Microsoft to the Redmond campus for a week. Microsoft assembled the group, dubbed the Information Worker Board of the Future, to help it get a better sense for how the workplace might evolve during the next decade -- and how the company's products might need to evolve during the same time frame, as people now in their late teens and early 20s enter the professional work force.