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Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge:
Microsoft held a special 50th anniversary event at its headquarters earlier today. During Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s presentation, a Microsoft employee interrupted the event to protest the use of Microsoft’s technologies in Israel’s war against Hamas. A second employee interrupted the event later on, while CEO Satya Nadella, co-founder Bill Gates, and former CEO Steve Ballmer were discussing 50 years of Microsoft.
The only opinionated public takes I’ve seen on these two protestors are from political extremes: a small number of people cheering them on, and another small number of people angrily decrying them as terrorist sympathizers. I suspect most people, though, have a take closer to my own, but are unwilling to espouse it lest they risk the ire of the two aforementioned political extremes. I’ll try.
There’s a time and a place for everything, and Microsoft’s own 50th anniversary celebration was not the time or place for two insufferable self-involved showboats to make the event about them. Because that’s what this was. It was about them, personally. Not about Gaza or Israel.
The place for righteous protests is in public, in the streets — exactly as they are happening across the United States today.
Of course Microsoft conducts business in Israel and with the Israeli government. They’re Microsoft — the entire point of the company (and thus the core point of the 50th anniversary celebration) is that their software is ubiquitous. Ranked by GDP, Israeli’s economy is 29th in the world. If Microsoft employees really want to make the case that the company should sever all ties to Israel, go ahead, but performance stunts at public celebrations are not the way. Why do they even work for Microsoft if they’re not happy to celebrate the company’s own 50th anniversary? Why did Microsoft hire people who seemingly despise the very company they work for?
I don’t know if you’ve heard but there’s a lot of horrible shit going on around the world right now. Should Microsoft sever all ties to Republican-led states that have made women’s reproductive healthcare illegal? (A woman in Georgia was just arrested after suffering a miscarriage.) Should Microsoft sever all ties to the U.S. federal government, which is now led by a mad tyrant who, in plain sight, attempted to overthrow an election he lost, and now claims (shocking no one) to be considering running for a third term that even a child could understand to be plainly unconstitutional? How much Microsoft software does ICE use? Or DOGE?
Where do such protests — all in the name of just causes — stop?
In the midst of all this madness and chaos — much of it already horrific, more of it suggestive of foreboding horrors to come — we need more than ever to savor, to appreciate, what’s still good about the world. Microsoft is a great American company. What a remarkable gift of good luck, good health, brilliant strategy, successful execution, steady leadership, and the right circumstances (e.g. Bill Gates’s precocious age — 19! — at the company’s founding) that the company has had only three CEOs in its half-century history and all three were available to join each other on stage to celebrate this anniversary, and the company’s still-bright future.
What a shitty thing to do it was to try to spoil this.
