I don’t know why, but there is a Matterport walkthrough of the original Microsoft Building 3, which now no longer exists.
This walkthrough appears to have been made not too long before the building was demolished to make room for the new Microsoft campus. I can tell by the office furnishings (such as height-adjustable beige desks) and the overall gray color theme of the building. Originally, the decor leaned heavily on oak for doors as well as desks, shelves, and cabinets.
Building 3 was one of the so-called “X-wing” buildings.¹ From above, you can see the X shape, so chosen to maximize the number of window offices. The challenge in the X-wing offices is not getting lost, since all the corridors look the same. There was a period of time when the Real Estate department tried to address this by painting the walls of each branch of the X a different color, but this didn’t help much because the colors were not recorded in the address book, so when you went looking for room 2352, you didn’t know what color wing it was in. You still had to wander the building looking for it.
Anyway, enjoy the walkthrough. The map is more complete on the second floor, so use that one to see how well you can navigate through the building.
Bonus reading: The Hallowe’en-themed lobby. Via the Matterport walkthrough, you can now stand in the lobby. But you’ll have to imagine the Hallowe’en decorations hanging from various pieces of fishing line. The fishing line was then connected to the four front doors, as well as slipped in the gap between the top of the glass wall and the ceiling, ultimately connected to nearby doors deeper inside the building.
¹ We also had “double X-wing buildings” which consisted of two X-wings glued together, so it looked from above like ++. As easy as it was to get lost in an X-wing building, it was doubly so in the double X-wing buildings.
> when you went looking for room 2352, you didn’t know what color wing it was in
This could be solved with a numbering scheme. Like, the leading 2 is the floor number, the next 3 is the wing number and let’s say wing 1 is red, 2 green, 3 blue, 4 yellow, after the colors of the Windows flag as scanned row-major top to bottom, left to right. And the following two digits could number the rooms in the corridor, from the center outwards, with odd numbers on your left, even on the right, facing rimwards.
For all I know, they did have such a system, but if they did, they didn’t tell anybody. (And remembering the number/color assignments would be another burden.)
Thinking back on it, I don’t think they did create that system because that would require renumbering all the rooms.