The last few weeks

The last 10 weeks seem to have flown away. It has been a busy 10 weeks, although I had my fair share of fun activities. The last few weeks are going to be a scramble, to tie up a lot of information processing together into a synchronized deliverable.

I am preparing for a presentation to my entire team in the last week, and that involves a lot of work with meeting the team and getting feedback on my work over the last week. The idea is to build a foundation for your work before you go into your final presentation and building consensus is especially important when working on the strategy team.

Last weekend was a mix of fun and work. On Saturday, four Rossers left early in the morning for Friday Harbor for a whale watching tour. I was blown away by the trip and the experience of being in the middle of the ocean surrounded by a pod of whales was surreal. Sunday however was at work, where I was pulling stuff together for my meetings on Monday. Then again, I was able to fit in breaks from work. Wednesday evening, I went to the IMax in downtown Seattle and was blown away by Inception.
My roommate, who is from Ross and an intern at Microsoft as well had a fantastic experience last week. He was attending the World Partner Conference at Washington DC. It was a fantastic experience where he learnt how crucial partners are for Microsoft’s enterprise offerings, the kind of products partners build on top of Microsoft’s offerings and their expectations from a partner conference. To top it all, he attended a keynote by Bill Clinton.
Speaking of famous speakers, we have had the chance to interact with the CVPs of all of Microsoft’s divisions. Last week is the grand finale, with Steve Ballmer speaking to us. These sessions have been great learning experiences, based on the career experiences of each one of these leaders and hearing about their vision of Microsoft.
This is my last post, and hopefully I will see you all back in AA starting September.

The end is near

I am in week 8 of my 12 week internship. While it has been a great experience so far, now is the time to start putting things together so that I am able to deliver a valueable end deliverable. That implies going over your work with relevant folks, stakeholders and otherwise, to get their perspectives on the issues at hand and itearate on the final deliverable based on their feedback. This process does get stressful at times but is a necessary part of delivering a good end-product.

I am currently working on search advertising. Google owns the lions share of the market, and given that this business has strong network effects, competitors find it difficult to gain market share. The network effect in search looks like this: a larger share of search queries leads to advertisers prefering the search engine which gives them a broader audience exposure, which in turn means that users will get more relevant advertisements for their search queries creating a better user experience and thus they will stick to the larger search engine. However with the launch of Bing, and now with the Yahoo deal (scheduled to go live in October), Microsoft will have a fighting chance of gaining query share and advertising spend.

On a related note, Microsoft's communication head put up an interesting blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/06/25/microsoft-by-the-numbers.aspx. It has been analysed by Techcrunch here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/

Moving onto things which are more fun, the fourth of July weekend was great. Watching Netherlands move into the semis was a perfect start. Saturday was a trip to Mt St Helens, an active volcano about 120 miles south of Seattle. On Sunday, I went Kayaking on Lake Union. All of these trips were with friends from Ross. We closed the weekend with a Microsoft sponsored barbeque and a great fireworks show. Hopefully I will be able to have a few more trips before the close of my internship.

Seattle - week 5

The last time I blogged, I was still figuring out my project. Well since then, I have finished one of my projects (after spending a few 14 hour days), made presentations and started working on my other projects. Online advertising is an ever evolving field, with new technologies evolving rapidly (compare it to offline advertising, which has been in steady state for decades!) and the strategy group provided a great experience to get an overall view of the business in a few weeks.

Online advertising can be separated into Display advertising and Search advertising. The display advertising space is insanely complex. The current value chain is summarized here http://www.adexchanger.com/pdf/Display-Advertising-Technology-Landscape-2010-05-03.pdf. Being in the strategy group involves thinking through how each segment of the value chain is evolving, and which segments will be able to maintain their margins while other segments might get commoditized. The image above also gives a great idea of the main players in the field.

Search advertising is much more organized. Advertisers primarily bid on keywords in an auction, and the winning advertiser is chosen based on his bid price and the historical probability of the ad being clicked. Its fascinating how such a simple idea is leading to billions of dollars in revenue for Google.

At Seattle, we probably have one of the largest MBA intern communities (between Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing) and the fact that all of us stay in the same apartment complex doesnt hurt. We had a bar crawl before heading to a Mariners game last weekend, which was a lot of fun. What made it special was a few Rossers flew from around the country for the weekend! World cup matches on weekends is becoming a routine, as are boardgames nights and dinners on weekdays.

I am looking forward to the next 7 weeks and hopefully will have interesting stories to tell in my next post. Until then..

Internship: Quarter 1

I completed 3 weeks at Microsoft last Friday. These three weeks have been very exciting. I have been learning the lay of the land of online advertising, which seems to be evolving daily. While its all clubbed together as online advertising, different subverticals have completely different challenges. Paid search ads, diplay ads, mobile ads, Video ads, all have their own unique set of challenges. I have been lucky to get a chance to speak with people within most of these groups, and have been learning a lot.

The tools that come in handy are excel and powerpoint. I highly recommend the Excel courses to the class of 2012. The course covers the basics of excel, and is essential if you have not used Excel extensively in your past life. I also find that my MAP experience was really helpful in preparing me for the internship. I am better prepared for the informational interviews because of MAP.

The rain Gods have not been very kind to us over the past few weeks, and it has rained continuously. However we do get sunny patches once in a while, and this Saturday was one such day. A group of 20 MBAs (interns from all over the country, working for Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing etc) went to Twin Falls, for a early morning hike. It was a lot of fun and we got to meet a ton of great people.

The next few weeks at work are devoted to completing a financial model and developing a framework for search advertisement innovation. As I will describe in the next post, the display advertising space can be very intimidating, and it takes a significant amount of time to wrap your head around some of the concepts. I am looking forward to a ton of learning. Till then, Sayonara..

Week 1 at Microsoft

Since my last post, I finished my MAP presentations, drove to 3 national parks in Arizona, Utah and California, hiked in 2 of them, packed for 12 straight hours at Ann Arbor and finally moved to Seattle. It was a whirlwind 17 days but well worth it. My friend had a Michigan hat on all the time, and the number of “Go Blue’s” the hat drew was surprising. Be it on a hike in Utah or at a fast food joint in Las Vegas, those words usher in a bon homie. It really reaffirms my decision of choosing to join Ross.

We had a very well organized orientation the first day where we got to meet the other interns and were detailed about the social activities organized for the interns during the summer. The highlights include a lunch talk by Steve Ballmer, a private show by Cirque de Soleil and a boat treasure hunt on Lake Washington. I am an intern with Microsoft's online advertising strategy group. My project is related to paid search and display advertising. Being an internal strategy project, the work is very challenging and I am learning a lot. People here are very helpful, always ready to spend time coaching you and have a casual intensity about them. In addition to that, we have a strong alumni presence and I have already met two Ross alums in my group.

The bonus we got is that there are about 25 Ross interns in Seattle and most of us are staying in the same apartment complex in downtown Seattle. We keep bumping into each other in the apartment lobby and have been hanging out over the weekends. It looks like the ideal setting for a great summer ahead. I will update you about all my "adventures" in the upcoming posts. Stay tuned!