There’s another aspect to Cohen’s job: softening Microsoft’s image in a business community that, as testimony in the antitrust trial amply demonstrated, tends to view it as a menacing outsider. In that effort, Cohen got a new weapon last month. Workers moved into the first of five buildings on Microsoft’s gleaming new Silicon Valley campus, a 32-acre plaza in Mountain View, a stone’s throw from traditional Microsoft foes like Netscape and Sun. When completed next year, the new digs will house almost all of Microsoft’s 1,200 local employees, who were previously scattered around the Bay Area. They will also give Cohen and his division a centralized and highly visible base from which to prove Microsoft a good company to work for–and with–in the booming Internet economy.
Microsoft has always had divisions here, including its recently acquired WebTV and Hotmail units. But to keep up with new product releases, test software in its labs or pursue a partnership, Valleyites often had to get on a plane to Redmond, Wash. Moreover, Microsoft was seen as an outsider likely to crush you–or buy you–if it coveted your business. “It was clear that we weren’t doing a very good job of maintaining our relationships here,” Cohen says. Last year, Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists told visiting Microsoft execs as much at a series of industry roundtables. Plans for the beefed-up Valley presence soon followed.
That’s where Cohen came in. The 31-year-old New Jersey native is laid back and affable, qualities not normally associated with Bill Gates & Co. His bosses also liked the fact that as an employee of Apple Computer and software maker Claris in the ’80s, Cohen was once himself a member of the anti-Microsoft camp. “I understand,” he says, “what it’s like to sit across the table from Microsoft and start with a high level of distrust.”
Valleyites, inherently skeptical of Microsoft’s size and weight, haven’t made Cohen’s job easy. “There’s a natural tension between the start-up mentality of the Valley and the substantial centralized power that Microsoft has come to represent,” says Jerry Kaplan, CEO of Onsale.com. But Guy Kawasaki, founder of Internet incubator Garage.com (which Microsoft now sponsors), thinks Cohen helps his bosses in Redmond just by being easily approachable and omnipresent at industry functions. “When you meet Microsoft people, you realize they are smart, really efficient and don’t have horns growing out of their heads,” he says. Though Cohen feels more welcome every day, he thinks it will take at least three years until the animosity is completely healed. “The answer is time. You can’t just show up and say, ‘I like you, so you should like me.’ We need to prove ourselves a decent partner.”
The new campus will give Cohen’s team the resources to do that. The buildings will feature a computer lab for developers to test their Windows-based programs and a center for start-ups to seek funding and expertise. There will also be a Microsoft sign visible from Highway 101, where Valley commuters spend hours in traffic every week. A visit to the facility also reveals that Microsoft has made sure to include amenities like free Odwalla juice, offices (not cubicles) for everyone and a health club–no doubt to aid with the all-important task of employee recruitment. But upon leaving a conference room in the new building, a visitor is surprised when the door handle comes off in his hand. Maybe Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus is still in beta.
