Matterport walkthrough of the original Microsoft Building 3
21 comments
·July 16, 2025ThrowawayB7
That brings back memories. Seeing that all too familiar office layout, furniture, scribbled notes on whiteboards, and whatnot somehow evokes both homesickness and PTSD at the same time.
The offices were nice though. Back in the early days, it didn't take that much seniority to get a single person office and a little more to get an office with a window.
tomcam
I worked in Building 2 and it was my best job ever. Loved every second of it. They knew the need for thinking time, hence individual offices. Buildings 1-8 were in a wooded area with trails threaded through the area. Gorgeous in any weather but especially snow days. Jogging there in the snow was gorgeous, and of course they had showers so you could change.
dreamcompiler
The original Microsoft building is in Albuquerque. Maybe this is the first one in Washington?
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/historic-microsoft-plaqu...
mattgrice
No it is not, an earlier WA building (not necessarily the earliest) was across from the Burgermaster on SR520/Northup Way. I think they meant it's the original MS building 3. As far as I know there is no 'new' building 3.
jamiem
There's a new building 3 as part of the East campus redevelopment
mynameisash
The title is referring to the fact that the building shown is the original Building 3. It has since been demolished, and now there's a new Building 3.
mynameisash
> when you went looking for room 2352, you didn’t know what color wing it was in.
I worked in building 6 for a while. That was frustrating because the two halves of the building were mirror images. If I had to go to the other side of the building for a meeting, I got disoriented and thought I knew the way back to my office, but I kept getting it wrong. It's like the Upside Down.
abeyer
The blog post is right that the double x-wings were the worst. I _never_ got the hang of 9 the whole time I sat there.
avidiax
Microsoft campuses were always impossible to navigate. The buildings are numbered in the Japanese style, i.e. chronologically.
Why not number buildings on a battleship grid? Building B6 must be adjacent to A6 and B7, as opposed to building 40 being adjacent to 27. Why not prefix the office numbers of an X-wing building with cardinal directions? If you see office N202, and you need office W107, head to the core, down the stairs, and one hallway to the left.
abeyer
Not to mention that some people always used the golf course code names for clusters of buildings, too... which were never "official" so there wasn't even any signage or anything to refer to for those. I remember being pointed to a pile of "stuff new people ought to know but HR won't tell you" on some random share in NTDEV when I started and it had a map with those marked on it.
RyJones
116/117/118/119 were just like that: rotations and reflections of each other. So confusing!
Rodeoclash
This is my dream office setup - small pods of developers where you can close the door if you need to focus. Kit the room out how you like it.
jerpint
I wonder how long we’ll start seeing demos like this with just Gaussian splatting and seemless transitions / infinite exploration
Aeolun
When they still knew how to build offices…
Helithumper
Relevant Blogpost: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250708-00/?p=11...
dhx
What was the need for reinforced (wire mesh) internal glazing?
toast0
Possibly for fire rating. Wire mesh glass was common on fire rated doors to stairways and such, although there's other ways to accomplish that now.
Edit: I had some trouble with the site, but figured it out enough to see that the offices have big doors, and then a window next to them that's mesh glass. Some of the doors have fire door tags (although you can't read them, and I only found one), and most don't. I suspect there was a code requirement for some of the offices to have fire rated construction, thus the fire door, and then you need the window and the drywall also fire rated. Other offices probably didn't need that, but maybe they used the same glass for everything for consistency.
But, I'm not an architect or an appropriate engineer, my spouse holds a bachelor's degree in architecture, so I've got some knowledge by osmosis.
dhx
Thanks. It seems such glazing was common in American 1970's era construction as a way to evenly distribute across the pane and into the frame the heat from a fire on one side of the window. This extends the time before the glass shatters, which once shattered allows flames/smoke through. It has commonly been misunderstood to be "stronger" glass, an overloaded term that might have some applicability to fire resistance, but has given people the wrong idea about impact resistance. Glazing with embedded wires is much less impact resistant whilst also posing additional safety risk to humans impacting the glass. When humans attempt to pull themselves out of glass they've impacted, the wires hold sharp glass shards in place causing even more severe injuries.[1]
It looks like all adjoining offices on the exterior of the building are single fire zones, with stairwells at either end of each zone. Internal offices seem to be divided into fire zones too (e.g. 6x2 rooms as a single zone) with use of the odd internal slab-to-slab wall that would possibly be fire resistant.
avidiax
The doors had locks (at least if you had a need for one), so I suppose this is simple security. Not that you can't hop the drop ceiling or just go through the drywall with less noise and mess.
jwoglom
I love that the black trash cans say "Microsoft" on them, for some reason.
Not much I miss about working at Microsoft, except that everyone had an office, and if you had even a couple of years of seniority, you had that office to yourself. The window offices required 5 years' seniority when I joined, and when I had 5 years' seniority, window offices required 10 years' seniority...
Even Microsoft has gone open office now, though.