Tellme -> Microsoft

This week, after lots of stress and speculation and suspense, my company, Tellme, got sold to Microsoft.

So far it seems like a pretty sweet deal. They came in and talked to us, and they're pretty excited about the whole thing, and the benefits of working for a big ass company are shocking after being at a dot-com for so long. 401k matching? Bonuses? What are these things?

We're still in the governmental approval phase, and that will move on to the assimilation phase, but so far I'm feeling pretty good. It looks like they want to take Tellme's voice technology and put it in lots more things than we'd ever be able to on our own. A few years from now, you might turn on your car and use Tellme to find a local restaurant, or use Xbox live to get tickets to a movie through Tellme, etc. There's lots of possibilities when you're Microsoft.

Anyway, during the buyout, I took lots of pictures, because it was surreal beyond belief. We all basically stopped working and started drinking once it was obvious that the announcement would come later in the day. What was amazing was that everyone filtered into the game room, and we had a HUGE gathering, and killed a bottle of rum and maybe five of scotch, and then all filed into the main room to hear the big news.

Here's some pictures of what it looks like to be bought by Microsoft:




Our game room, drinking:







Back out in the main room for the annoucement:



We all signed the bottle of booze we finished:



A crappy, blurry shot of our CEO and the President of the Business division of Microsoft making the actual announcement:



Nothing but class:



Here's a link to the full album, if you wanna see all the shots:

http://picasaweb.google.com/tobin.coziahr/MicrosoftSale