More Fear and Loathing in Seattle (Premium)

Read part one of this story, Fear and Loathing in Seattle (Premium).

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25 years ago, I was consulting for a software company named AnySoft that was actively trying to hire me to document its breakthrough technology. It had figured out a way to intercept the presentation and underlying data in any Windows app with the aim of making all software interoperable without the need for its authors to specifically adopt OLE or whatever other standards of the day. And as it was ramping for release, it asked me to join them in Israel, where it was based, for a week of strategy meetings. It was too good of an opportunity to miss, so that August, I headed off on what was, at the time, my most distant trip.

My experience in Israel that week was notable for many reasons. By that point, I had already been working from home for over five years–I was an outlier in this way until COVID normalized WFH, as we now call it, starting in 2020. And when one of the execs called my hotel room on the second morning to tell me that we’d all be heading into the office soon, I jokingly pretended to be confused because I had just gone to the office the previous day. And it was fascinating to swim in the Mediterranean Sea, visit the many historic and religious sites in Jerusalem, and see a part of the world I have yet to return to all these years later.

But the most notable part of this experience, perhaps, was the security. Even in the pre-9/11 world, Israel was a fortified island. It was–and is–surrounded by enemies that wish for nothing less than its total annihilation, and it has long lived with the daily threat of that annihilation using strategies that are still unfamiliar to those of us in the rest of the western world, despite the escalation of terrorism worldwide over the intervening wars. Here in the U.S. we saw glimpses of this reality post-9/11, of course, and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings were closer to home than I’d ever wanted for my children. But we have no idea what it means to be under constant threat.

We had been briefed about the security protocols before the trip. And as you might expect, we were routinely searched, and sidelined, as we traveled around, at the airport and via regular militarized roadblocks. The most disconcerting of these events, oddly, occurred when we flew home. I was traveling with an American employee of the company, a guy I worked with closely before, during, and after the trip. And the security procedure at the airport was beyond anything we experience to this day in the U.S. We were interviewed in separate rooms by different individuals, each backed by armed security. We had to explain what we had done in Israel and then provide documentation that proved what we said. Among other things, we had to turn on our laptops and then show them what was in whatever folders and documents. It was more than a little intimidating.

But it ended, eventually, as all things do. And then the person who interviewed me left, and another person came in the room and started down the same line of questioning. I thought there was a mistake, so I explained that I had already gone through all this. He said, “Just do it again.” So I did, but as this progressed, I finally said something about maybe just asking the guy who had previously interviewed me and inspected my computer. He told me that that person was now interviewing the guy I was traveling with. And that the point of this was to make sure that our stories lined up. Gulp.

We weren’t up to anything nefarious, of course, so we passed the test in time and reconnoitered beyond security. Even given the previous week in Israel, we were rattled by this experience. And to this day, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. But if my experience at Build last week is any indication, we may be headed into a dark, new era of surveillance and security in which just being affiliated with Big Tech could make in-person events too dangerous to stage. It’s impossible not to wonder what the disruptions you heard about from the show–and, more to the point, the ones you did not–would have been like if the protesters escalated into literal terrorism.

Day one, continued

After finishing up my virtual live coverage of the Build 2025 day one keynote with Leo and Richard, I cleaned up and took the elevator downstairs into the Sheraton Grand lobby to head over to the old convention center, which was at one point renamed to Seattle Convention Center | Arch. This was super-convenient, as it was right next door to the hotel, just a block away. My aim was to find the press working room, which my calendar told me was on the third floor, see who was at the show and catch up on writing. I’d almost never done this, but schedule permitting, I was hoping to attend a session or two, knowing that if–when–this didn’t happen, I could simply catch the video replays later.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been to the old convention center. Among other things, it’s where Microsoft often held its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), the show at which it first revealed the technologies coming in the next version of Windows so that hardware makers could get started on drivers and other low-level code. This was where I had had lunch with Todd Bishop, then a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, that led to what is now a 20-year friendship with Mary Jo Foley. It’s where I met Rafael. It’s a place I know very well.

Walking uphill on Pike Street next to the hotel, it was immediately obvious that there was something going on outside the convention center. This was a far cry from previous shows where the only people outside the building were those heading to the show or commuters heading to and fro. The last time I had been in the old convention center, Brad and I ran into Microsoft vice president Laura Butler in a full body cat costume, handing out homemade cookies to anyone who wanted them.

This was … different.

A group of 50 or more were outside the main corner doors to the Arch convention center. They were carrying signs–“Microsoft profits off genocide,” “TOF OFF Azure,” “Your code kills kids,” and the like–and a Palestinian flags, chanting and yelling and generally causing a commotion. This didn’t feel dangerous to me, just loud. And after crossing the street opposite the crowd to assess the situation, I decided to plow forward. So I crossed back over, waded through the protesters, exchanging eye contact a few times and seeing nothing worrying, and approached the doors.

Well. I tried to approach the doors. There were metal blockades that extended in both directions around the building. And, come to think of it, black military-style police officers everywhere, some incongruously and inadvertently less threatening on their cute bicycles. And military-type vehicles circling. And …

“Sir.”

Shaken out of my sudden observations, I looked at the man in the suit who was blocking my way through the barricades. “Oh, it’s OK,” I said, holding up my press badge.

I was not OK.

He explained that I could not come inside. They were on total lockdown. I explained that I just wanted to get to the press room, and that there was a conference occurring regardless of the protests. He suggested that I circle the building and try a different door. Hm.

So I did that. I waded through a few more protesters–still nothing worrying–went down 7th Avenue, between my hotel and the convention center, and then turned left on Union. Still the same block, but another world. I don’t recall now if there was an entrance on that side, but if there was, it was closed to me too. And so I turned left again when I got to the far side of the building, into a dark, subterranean street, 8th Avenue, I guess, that was more inviting to cars than to the people. Among other things, there was a garage entrance for the convention center back there. And, for those who parked there, I assume, a back entrance.

This one was open, but I had to go through security, take everything out of my bag, and submit my laptop to a swab test like those I sometimes see at airports. I had to go through the metal detector three times, thanks to my belt, watch, and/or glasses, but I finally got inside. And made my way up to the third floor. I was looking for a room named Issaquah, which I assumed was a meeting room, but all the meeting rooms on that floor were numbered, not named. I asked a few of the people working there if they knew where this room was, but none had even heard of it–they were likely all temporary employees, there for whatever events–and one suggested that it might be in the other building. I could see the protesters outside the front door, far below.

The Arch convention center is so named for the arched glass roof that extends over Pike Street between its two buildings. And there is a walkway between the two, so I wouldn’t have to go back outside. Except that walkway was, for now, at least, closed to me. And so outside it was. I was back at the parking garage rear entrance, asking a security guard there how I could get into the other building, on the north side.

“Good luck,” he told me, indicating that I could walk up Union Street back to Pike and try one of the street-level entrances there. Which I did. This took a while, but I was able to get into the other building after sliding between two of the bicycle-mounted police officers that had formed in a line the entire width of the building, smiling again at the bikes. Cute. Security, again, this time minus the laptop swab. And then up to the third floor on escalators, to an area I immediately recognized from when Mary Jo and I had joined Greg Sullivan for a HoloLens 2 hands-on demo back in … 2019, I guess.

But there was the same problem. None of the temporary employees working there knew where anything was, and of course none had heard of Issaquah. I felt like this room would be in the main building, not here. So I went back downstairs and headed back outside. The group of protesters had grown, it seemed, and they were now mobile, moving up the street in between the two sides of the convention center. I had spent 40 minutes trying to find this stupid meeting room. So I finally looked at my phone again, and at the entry I had made in my calendar. All it said was, Media room. “Level 3 – Room Issaquah.” Which I already knew. So I opened Gmail and searched for the email that had all the logistics information for the show. I had made a huge mistake.

Hilariously, Issaquah was in the Sheraton Grand, the hotel I was staying in, and not in the convention center. This is hilariously mostly for where it was in the hotel, which has two towers. It was in the Union tower, like my room. And it was on the third floor, two floors below my room. Like my room, it was right off the elevators. And so 45 minutes after I left that room to find the press room, I was in a press room I could have literally reached in 45 seconds had I just paid attention. Classic me.

I ran into Todd Bishop there, go figure, but he lives in the Seattle area, and that explained his attendance. There weren’t many other press members there, but I didn’t know any of them, and the few I vaguely recognized, solely from trips like this, were from Asia. I was reminded of the conversation I had had with Frank Shaw the previous afternoon. I had told him at the time that I had in the past gone to several non-Microsoft shows and that those shows were identical to the Microsoft events in all ways but one: I never knew anyone. But now, 30-plus years in, I was having this same experience at Microsoft shows. It felt weird. It was like life was sending me a message, and this was a feeling I would get again and again throughout the week.

I caught up with Todd, ate a mostly terrible lunch that would end up being the only food Microsoft provided me that week. And then ended up going back to the hotel room to work. My weird day at Build was mostly over before it even began. There was a lot to do and no time to do it. And before I knew it, I was exchanging text messages over at least three different apps with friends who were visiting for the show or in the area, planning whatever we’d do that night. By the time I got back to the hotel, it was 1:00 am. And I had to be up at what should have been a normal time, given the time change, to cover the day two developer keynote, and, a bit later, the announcements from the Google I/O keynote, which was happening down in California, unnecessarily at the same time as Microsoft’s show. F’ing Google.

Day two

I wasn’t covering the Build 2025 developer keynote live, so I could at least stay in my hotel room. It opened with newly appointed Microsoft AI apps czar Jay Parikh, who I had seen but not met at the Sunday afternoon pre-briefing. Sitting behind him while CTO Kevin Scott had spoken, I had assumed he was Satya Nadella. But when he was introduced and bounded up on stage, I learned he was someone else entirely. Someone I was not particularly familiar with beyond him being hired away from Facebook/Meta last year.

As was the case with Nadella’s appearance in the open keynote, Parikh was interrupted by a protester who was embedded in the audience. As was the case with Nadella, he had been briefed to keep talking if and when this interruption occurred. But this time, things were different. Both sides had made adjustments based on the failure of the previous protesters to make it onstage and disrupt the speech to a greater degree than they had.

If you watched the day two keynote live, you saw two things that differed from day one. Parikh wasn’t as successful in continuing to speak as Nadella had been. And Microsoft security actually cut the video feed briefly to ensure that the protesters–as with day one, there were more than the one–didn’t get their moment on video as they had wanted.

As with the first keynote, Microsoft had placed security all over the keynote hall, both obvious and unobvious. In the latter category were curiously muscled faux show goers, wired with microphones and ready to leap if anything went down. I was told more than once that many of these people were ex-military, but since I didn’t confirm that with a decision-maker, I can’t say for sure that it’s true. I can say, based on what did happen at both keynotes that they were well-prepared and moved so quickly that no protesters ever reached the stage.

They did get close. On day two, rather than have a single obvious diversion, the protesters had multiple diversions, some in the form of employees who stood to loudly shout about their cause, and some who had brought in signs of support. The goal here was the same as before, however, to distract. Microsoft’s security team wasn’t fooled, however. They quietly and efficiently removed the sign-holders before the show started, and they placed even more staff around the room so that they could react to local distractions or protestors more quickly. This mostly worked, though the day two protesters were a bit more successful in that Microsoft had to cut the feed. And then edit it after the fact.

After the two keynotes, I headed down to the press room to grab lunch before a few meetings. But no: The press room was open, but there was no food beyond a few snacks and no drinks beside the basics. Microsoft’s reduced budget for this event only allowed for meals on day one. This felt unfair to me, given the incredible cost of the trip and all the time I would spend–and waste–before, during, and after the show. But what can you do? I headed out again, thinking I could grab something relatively inexpensive nearby or just grab something at the attendee meal room.

Once again, I turned up Pike Street to walk the half block to the convention center, but this time I spoke with my wife on the phone. As we talked, I could see that there were no protesters, and the barricades were gone, as were most of the police. It seemed relatively normal, in fact. I didn’t want to go through security while I was on the phone for obvious reasons, so I stood on the corner, while we talked, taking in the pro-Palestine posters that were stuck all over the utility pole near me. Lovely.

As we spoke, Seattle happened around me. People were walking in all directions, cars came and went, it was a normal city scene. And then something odd briefly caught my attention. A woman in a professional suit was coming up Pike Street, the same way I had come, and she was holding two fistfuls of light blue helium balloons, maybe 15 or so in each hand. The distraction was brief, these things happen, perhaps there was a party at work or whatever. I didn’t think anything of it.

And then I finished the call, jammed the phone in my front pocket, and resigned myself to another security experience. This time, it was light. I could keep everything in my bag and just open it for the security staff. I walked through the metal detector, which didn’t go off despite me carrying the same metal items as the previous day, collected my bag, and started walking into the convention center. Then a commotion started behind me, at the security checkpoint I had just passed through.

It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing, but it was this: That woman in the professional business suit was pushing her way through security. She succeeded and let go of the balloons. As they floated up into the atrium, which is possibly 100 feet high, a banner unfurled from each set of balloons with a pro-Palestinian slogan on each. And each rang out multiple alarms, like alarm clocks but louder, as they rose. The startled security guards all looked up, helpless to stop this. And the woman ran outside into the streets of Seattle, untouched. She disappeared.

I couldn’t see the roof of the atrium area from where i was standing, but I could still hear the alarms as the balloons disappeared from view. I looked over at the security guards, who all had the same confused looks on their faces, like this was a problem they were not going to solve. And so I just walked further into the convention center. The alarm sounds quickly faded and disappeared. And before I knew it, I was looking up at the multiple levels of escalators that go and up down in the center of the building. There were people everywhere, the show was lightly attended, so it must have been between sessions.

Confronted by this normal convention scene barely a minute after the bizarre balloon incident, I had a few immediate thoughts. One, this type of thing could be going on all the time all over this show, and few would even know about these incidents unless they happened to witness them. And two, maybe that was the point. These disruptions, these mostly harmless versions of terrorism, were designed to shake Microsoft and show goers out of their sense of normal. No one I saw in front of me would have any idea that what I had seen had even occurred. And someone leaving the convention center then might hear the alarms but not place them or look up, and would likely consider it just part of normal city noise.

I went up a few escalators and decided to pull over to the side to regroup. I had to figure out where the attendee lunch was, and where my first meeting, still about 90 minutes away was. As I searched my phone for this information, a metal door behind me burst open, and a security guard quietly said, “we’ve got two of them on the second floor, send help,” as he ran off parallel to the escalators. I was trying to understand what had just happened when someone I knew from Microsoft came up the escalator, and we caught up, shaking me out of the weird feeling I was having. I told him about the balloons and the security guard, but he hadn’t witnessed either.

I ended up eating in the attendee lunchroom, describing it as being similar to the bottom of the Titanic when I called Mary Jo afterward to catch her up on the things I had seen and to congratulate her on her decision to skip the show this year.

Over the remainder of the day, I had a few meetings, which were worthwhile. But more importantly, perhaps, I caught up with several friends I have at Microsoft, hearing horror stories about the recent layoffs and how much they had rattled the employee base. Microsoft had had performance-based layoffs earlier in the year, and that made sense to everyone, for the most part. (In some cases, employees who had been warned earlier had turned things around, but their full-year evaluations were still low enough that they lost jobs.) But these recent layoffs were different. Purposefully random, and at every level and in every organization. They lost good people for no stated reason. The general feeling is that management thought scaring everyone would generate a sense of purpose.

The layoffs had clearly had the opposite effect. Everyone I spoke with was dejected. They were confronting something they had never considered previously, the ugly possibility that any day could be their last at the company, no matter their contributions. They were resigned. And terrified. All of them told me there would be more layoffs before the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year on June 30. The exact number varied, some told me one and others told me two. Xbox would be among the worst hit, I was told. (Microsoft CFO) Amy Hood was out for blood, one said, explicitly.

This was not the Build that has long been my favorite annual Microsoft event. And this was not the Microsoft I’ve known for so many years, the swaggering, confident company that successfully embraced the cloud and emerged triumphant on the other side of that transition as one of the most successful companies on earth. Given its recent successes, this made no sense. To me or anyone I spoke to who still works there. Everyone is confused.

Up in the show floor area where I had one of my meetings, I learned that the layoffs, which occurred just days before the show, had impacted Build in many ways. There were speakers who had to be swapped out at the last minute, and entire booths at the show that were erected and then quietly taken down when no one came to man them. I noted a bizarre headline I had seen earlier about Build being “disrupted 3 times” by protesters, and said that the number had to be much higher, given the two incidents I had just witnessed.

“Much higher,” one friend told me, leaning in. At that moment, there had been somewhere between 25 and 30 disruptions. Most had gone unreported, which was exactly what Microsoft wanted. The biggest success of this show, which had managed just over 3,000 paid attendees only after slashing the price, might have been the protester suppression.

Day three and the future

To the outside world, it was like nothing had happened, or that the disruptions were isolated to a few fringe employees. But it was worse than that, more than that. And it would keep getting worse. Ignite, historically a much bigger conference, will be held in San Francisco this November. Many are worried about bigger issues there. And that they won’t even have a job by then anyway.

All these things combined made Build 2025 the strangest Microsoft event I’d ever attended. Any one of them would have terrible in its own way. But I’m still struggling to understand what happened and what it means, for now and for the future. The juxtaposition of Microsoft’s success with these terrible events is difficult, if not impossible, to explain. I’m continually looking for reason, but I’m coming up short here.

I never once felt threatened or unsafe. I worried more for my few remaining friends at the company, and I’m sad that they’ve become de facto grief counselors for those left behind and those who were let go, many of whom were more than just coworkers.

Last Wednesday, I recorded Windows Weekly live from the show from Richard, which is always enjoyable. But that same day, two young Israeli embassy staffers were murdered in Washington D.C. by a group of people who shouted “Free Palestine” as they opened fire on the pair. This could get uglier, still. It almost certainly will. Our world is a shit show of violence and stupidity with no end in sight.

It wasn’t all bad, I was able to catch up with more friends last week than usual, and that was nice. I came home exhausted on Thursday–more on that soon–and then had to quickly pivot to our annual trip to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York with my sister and her husband. But I would have rather crawled into a corner and slept. Everything feels broken and wrong. Because it is. As I write this, we’re driving home. I have to finish this and my brother-in-law is jokingly telling me that my laptops must not last very long because he can hear me typing away. He’s confused that I don’t take time off. I have to get this out.

And then I have to sleep. And process. And try to make sense of that which doesn’t make sense. And do my freaking job, which is harder than ever because of the news that Microsoft wanted me to focus on last week, the near constant, rapid-fire AI announcements that I can’t possibly keep up on. Now or ever. But all you can do is try. It feels so pointless sometimes. But I will try.