Making Software Sexy

Microsoft discovers that software should be—surprise!—a thing of beauty.

By Steven Johnson
May 29, 2004 5:00 AMNov 12, 2019 4:07 AM

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I’m sitting in a darkened conference room in Microsoft’s vast campus in Redmond, Washington, talking to a team of software developers as they flash images from their latest operating system onto a wall-size screen. We’re not talking about the usual Microsoft subjects—the company’s prodigious market share, the value of its stock, or the number of lines of code in the latest version of Office.

We’re talking about beauty.

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