The fact that you had to click a start button to switch off a PC, didn’t deter me from working at the company which made this operating system. When I decided to pursue my career at Microsoft, it was both a time of celebration and a time of that impending challenge of the unknown. A myriad questions came to my mind given that I had worked in relatively smaller organizations earlier in my career. On the first day, at 9am I sat in the Microsoft Dubai office lobby waiting for my manager to escort me into the global corporate world and eager as a new employee is, I wanted to know-it-all in a day and to that end, I opened the questionnaire floodgate as soon as we entered the elevator. Upon reaching our designated floor, my boss stopped me outside the elevator and said ‘One topic a day’ he couldn’t have been more right. Over the years, I could only imagine how big and matrixed this company is. I took pride in the fact that the place where I worked, touched the lives of so many people, knowingly or unknowingly, on daily basis. During my term at Microsoft, I witnessed company releasing three iterations of its flagship OS, three versions of its ubiquitous Office productivity software and three incarnations of its server platform. The excitement generated before the releases of these products was contagious.

Today, on 28th February 2013, I turned in my badge and laptop and I walk out of the Microsoft Dubai office. The journey at Microsoft comes to an end after five and a half years. Microsoft Dubai has carved a special place in my life, but I guess there isn’t a better time to move in your career, when an opportunity comes along where you can learn new skills and complement your existing ones and that time, for me, has come. My time at Microsoft Dubai was no less than a narrative and to borrow a line from a literary narrative, tomorrow is another day!