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Microsoft’s Baudboys head to San Francisco this week to compete for national a cappella singing title. By Fred Albert April 29, 2008 It has all the makings of a Hollywood hit: Eight nerds band together to form a singing group. On the eve of the big competition, one of the members breaks his back, but the show goes on, and in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds, the geeks beat out the pros to nab the grand prize. Microsoft’s own Baudboys, an eight-man a cappella singing group, took top honors March 8 at the Pacific Northwest Harmony Sweepstakes,Office Pro Plus 2010 Activation Key, besting more experienced groups for the title of top a cappella group in the region, despite the fact that first tenor Ric Lewis had to spend much of the concert confined to a chair due to a degenerate disc. “The fact that we won Northwest Harmony Sweeps was the upset of the year,Office 2010 Home And Student Key, because we were going up against six other professional groups,” marveled Dave McEwen, Baudboys president and a content project manager for Developer and Platform Evangelism. “When they finally announced who won, we were all in shock.” Later this week, the group travels to the San Francisco area to compete against seven of the best groups in the nation at the 24th annual Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Festival. The competition is scheduled for Saturday. It’s a big leap for a group that was founded in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of the Microsoft chorale the Microtones. “There were some guys who enjoyed singing barbershop music from their days in the Ivy League, so they split off to do quartet stuff,” McEwen said. Over time, the group came to realize that madrigals, English drinking songs, and repeated choruses of “Sweet Adeline” were not going to get them bookings, so they switched to popular music. Today, the group applies their smooth, close-harmony styling to pop hits by the likes of Paul Simon, ELO, and The Police, as well as specialty numbers like the hilarious “Gonna Make You Happy Tonight”—a song of seduction sung by an Xbox addict who’s eager to score, but maybe not in the way his lady would like.The group has fun with the nerd image, knowing that there’s probably a portion of every audience that comes expecting the worst from a squad of computer nerds. “There’s never a point in the show where we’re anything other than geeks,” said McEwen, adding that in concerts, they actually sport T-shirts with the word emblazoned across the chest. Even the name “Baudboys”—a reference to the method by which computer modem speeds were once rated—carries its own geeky irony,Office Professional Plus 2010 Serial, since the group has outlasted the terminology that inspired its name. “We’ve talked about changing it, but at this point, we have just enough brand recognition that we don’t really want to mess up what we’ve got going,Office 2010 Professional Plus Serial,” said McEwen, the sole marketing guy in a cadre of program managers, engineers, and developers. The group rehearses for an hour and a half each week in a Redmond conference room. “It’s a break from being a geek,” says Lead Program Manager Mark Adolph, who joined the Baudboys in 1998, on the same day as Owen Braun, making the pair tied for the title of elder statesmen. As a student at Stanford, Adolph loved listening to campus a cappella groups and dreamed of participating in one. “I didn’t think I could sing,” he recalled. It wasn’t until years later, when he joined a church choir, that he discovered he had a gift. “I get a charge out of going up in front of an audience and pleasing them,” the baritone said. “It keeps me sane.”The Baudboys perform about a dozen times a year,Office 2010 Professional Plus Key, singing at professional sporting events, on campus, and at the company picnic. This fall, they’re even opening for The Coats at the Kirkland Performance Center. But one gig still eludes them. “Our goal is to eventually do a command performance for Bill and Steve,” McEwen said wistfully. Although the members are reveling in their current success, it’s not what keeps them going. “I’ve been through birth, marriage, divorce—all sorts of things with these guys,” Adolph said. “After this many years of singing together, we really are friends.”