Oh, I totally agree on that last point. I was in Vancouver the weekend before lockdown, at one of the last conventions, and watching the news about the facility my stepdad had stayed at just a few years before hit freakishly close to home… I had walked the halls featured in those news stories, where hazmat suites were traipsing around. My house is in Kirkland, and it was surreal returning and having lockdown kick in immediately upon return.
Also huge props to the fellow in charge of pandemic response in Washington State. There was an article I read last year where he discussed how he had the idea to get Microsoft, Amazon, and Google together to communicate a rapid, strong response to message to the local community how absolutely critical the situation was.
Ah! I found it! Whole thing is a great read:
Constantine thought that announcing school closings was a potent communication strategy for reaching even people who weren’t parents, because it forced the community to see the coronavirus crisis in a different light. “We’re accustomed to schools closing when something really serious happens,” Constantine told me. “It was a way to speed up people’s perceptions—to send a message they could understand.”
While the logistics of classroom closures were being worked out, Constantine contacted Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft—which is headquartered in Redmond, east of Seattle—and asked him to consider ordering employees to work from home. “Microsoft is a big deal here,” Constantine told me. “I thought if they told everyone to stay home it could shift how the state was thinking—make the pandemic real.” Microsoft, as a tech company, was poised to switch quickly to remote work, and could demonstrate to other businesses that the transition could occur smoothly. On March 4th, with only twelve known covid -19 fatalities across the nation and no diagnoses among Microsoft workers, the company told employees to stay home if they could. Smith told me, “King County has a strong reputation for excellent public-health experts, and the worst thing we could have done is substitute our judgment for the expertise of people who have devoted their lives to serving the public.” Amazon, which is also headquartered in the area, told many of its local employees to work from home as well. “That’s a hundred thousand people suddenly staying home,” one Seattle resident told me. “From commute traffic alone, you knew something big had happened.”
Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not | The New Yorker
Also came across this piece (disclaimer, I work for Microsoft), which does a good job showing some of the internal efforts that was taking place. Been there 20 years, and IMHO Satya is soooo much better in every way than Ballmer for the business(the former encourages us to pursue a growth mindset, in act and deed not just words, whereas Ballmer cultivated a culture of backstabbing self-service).
Quiet collective: The unseen experts behind Microsoft’s coronavirus response - Stories
