Hi, nerds. I'm Michael Moore hosting this podcast for dissecting popular IT nerds. I'm here with Mark Ellistad,

director of IT and digital transformation at Moses Lake Industries and co-founder of Better Tools LLC.

That's a mouthful. Mark, how are you doing today?

I'm doing very well.

It is a beautiful ball evening here.

And yeah, yeah, I couldn't be happy.

It's end of the work day for me.

So it's nice to leave work and go into a nice fun conversation about careers and IT and all that stuff.

It's great to have you on the program.

We're going to jump right in.

We're going to start off with our ice breaker segment.

It's called Random Access Memories.

I ask a question, and then you just respond with the answer that pops in your head

first, right? And your first question is if you could work or collaborate with any IT-related

company organization, what would it be? And why? Microsoft, the reason why, so I've been in the gig for, and it doesn't feel like a long time, but it's like 20 years now. And I've seen Microsoft in the past, especially like the last five years. they've gone from like the monolithic sort of, you know, black box software company into this sort of open, freewheeling organization that's just, like, they're just a fire hose of new apps and

capabilities and it's the way it's all built around the shared platform and the

dataverse like it's just it's very exciting to me and when I've spent my whole career, either working for small or

mid-sized companies, they're one of the only large technology companies where I'd like to see

how enterprise size works with whatever they've got going on that lets them have rapid innovation. That would be a

fun learning experience. That was a great, great response. Microsoft is a fantastic example of

a company that just keeps evolving and evolving and evolving. They were, they were, they're definitely not who they were when they first started,

and they've come a long way, and mere fact that they can just keep reinventing

...