What's the key story going on with microTech?
TL;DRmicroTech is a tech-campus culture that tolerates recreational drugs and offers perks to keep workers, but treats intellectual property theft as sacrosanct, which makes corporate espionage a big area to play with.
Basically, microTech obviously is the developer of mobiGlas. We sort of have this water-cooler description of New Babbage as Silicon Valley slash Cabo or Vail. Because it's basically this very weird mishmash of a lot of tech developers, and they really are trying to foster innovation and bring smart minds together and stuff like that. And this is something we discussed when Will and I were walking through halls carrying lattes: the idea that to them, recreational drugs are not good, people abuse them, but people need to blow off steam and party a little bit, so they'll turn a blind eye to it. But intellectual property theft on microTech is sacrosanct, you don't do that. So yeah, like what Will was saying, they have fallen into this interesting spin on capitalism or corporate culture, of being very lax with a lot of things but super hardcore with other things. So how does that exactly play out for their employees? And obviously, there's a huge market for corporate espionage. So that would be a big thing we get to play with there, because again, the stakes are so high. There's a lot of really cutting-edge development going on, there's a lot of interest in that next billion-dollar idea, and people are willing to shed some blood to get the next hot app.
Yeah, it's interesting, because it's almost like corporate campus culture taken to a planetary level. So it's almost the inverse of Hurston, where they try to lock you into these contracts where you can't leave. On microTech, it's Brave New World style, where they're like, well, let's give you all this good stuff so you don't want to leave. We'll put you in these domes, and you'll have all these yoga services and rock climbing walls and things like that. It's just a different way to try to entice people to want to stay there and stay working and active all the time and essentially not leave the planet.
Golden handcuffs type thing. You get all of these opportunities, and they're like, well, why do you need to take a vacation? Any place you want to go is right here. And so they get to trap them into working a little bit longer. It's not that insidious, but it's that type of thing.