One of the biggest social trends of 2014 was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. With the ultimate aim of raising money and awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, known also as motor neurone disease or Lou Gehrig"s Disease), people from regular folks to superstars and captains of industry threw buckets of ice water over themselves, and then nominated someone else to suffer the same fate.
Microsoft was among the many organizations that supported the Ice Bucket Challenge, and now that the ALS Association has announced its return in 2015, the company is getting behind the campaign in a very big way.
In addition to Microsoft"s former CEOs, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates (and Melinda Gates too!), its current chief executive, Satya Nadella, took the Ice Bucket Challenge last August. Nadella was nominated this week by Steve Gleason, the former NFL player who was diagnosed with ALS, to take the challenge again this year.
With the help of their enthusiastic Microsoft colleagues, Nadella and Windows chief Terry Myerson took the challenge in great spirits - but if you"re on the Windows Insider program, there"s bad news coming your way:
Nadella said that "in the spirit of Windows 10, I thought we"d upgrade the challenge, so I had Terry and the Windows 10 team join me". But that"s not the only upgrade they had in mind - as Terry explained: "We want to challenge our six million Windows Insiders all over the globe to take the challenge with us."
That"s not necessarily the "thank you" that Windows Insiders were hoping for after testing Windows 10 in recent months, but if you"re one of the six million, you should probably start filling up those ice cube trays in the freezer.