Most of the start-up's three dozen employees would be millionaires if they stayed with Microsoft for at least two years. The Sunday night after the deal closed, Vermeer sent Ted Stefanik out to Microsoft, like a space probe to a new planet. The place where Stefanik landed is only a 20-minute drive east of Seattle, but it is a community unto itself. Microsoft's 260-acre campus in the shadow of the Cascades features both handsomely kept lawns and construction cranes. Many of the three dozen buildings are X-shaped, the better to provide window offices to valued employees.
Modern art dominates the office decor.
Outside Building 16, there' s a courtyard paved in flagstones engraved with the name and release date of 340 Microsoft products. Many more flagstones are still blank. It was in Building 16 that Stefanik set up FrontPage on a computer and began to discover some of the comforts of his new home. Programmers are the first citizens in the Microsoft kingdom, and they are treated accordingly. Someone would deliver it.