Aging Microsoft lures young tech idealists

By Bill Rigby

SEATTLE (Reuters) - The young interns, some of the nation's best and brightest in technology, business and design, had plenty of enthusiastic words to describe their summer employer.

Fun. Cool. Special. A giant start-up. Revolutionizing the world. Facebook, perhaps? Or Twitter? Or Google?

Try Microsoft Corp: the company once derided as the "death star" of the technology business and lately thought of not so much as dangerous, but merely irrelevant, bureaucratic and dull.

"Microsoft feels cool again," said 22-year-old Gbenga Badipe, an electrical engineering student at Rice University, one of 1,500 interns spending 12 weeks at the company's leafy campus this summer. "Microsoft products touch almost every area of technology, and everything they do is starting to work together."

Microsoft's keen new interns already think their competitors' days are numbered, branding Google and Facebook as "creepy" because of their aggressive stance on privacy and heavy reliance on advertising.

"What kind of business model is that, shoving ads in peoples' faces?" said one Microsoft intern, who asked not to be named.

A recent poll by careers site Glassdoor put Google as the most desirable place to intern, followed closely by Microsoft. They are also the best paid, averaging over $6,000 a month.

Microsoft is "revolutionizing the world," said Juan Llanes, 25, a computer science and finance major at Georgia Tech, who is also interning in Redmond, Washington this summer. Llanes grew up revering Microsoft during his childhood in Cuba, where computers were effectively banned.