While Microsoft battles boardroom blues and those quaint European notions of how to do business, it also is pondering the results of one of the most unusual focus groups ever assembled: "The meeting attended Friday afternoon by Microsoft Corp. Group Vice President Jeff Raikes was, in some ways, like many others. A group from outside the company presented Raikes and his team of executives with a series of suggestions, including one for a new product, and promised to follow up with a formal proposal outlining how they might work together in the future," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. "But this was no ordinary meeting. The people making the presentation were 15 university students from around the world, brought by Microsoft to the Redmond campus for a week. Microsoft assembled the group, dubbed the Information Worker Board of the Future, to help it get a better sense for how the workplace might evolve during the next decade -- and how the company's products might need to evolve during the same time frame, as people now in their late teens and early 20s enter the professional work force."

The students came from 14 countries. One was this contrarian from Norway, who apparently got into quite a debate with Raikes: "I think the mindset that you're showing now is exactly what is the problem," Oyvind Kildal Stangnes, a 24-year-old business student told Raikes, the PI reported. "We don't need more features; we don't need more tools. We just need them to work. We just need to be able to operate them. And we need everyone to be able to do that." Here's betting that Oyvind's chutzpah gets him a few job offers from the Linux community..