Studio711.com – Ben Martens

My Name In Windows 8 Screenshots

The other day I was telling the story of how my name showed up in many of the Windows 8 screenshots when they launched it. But look as I might, I could not find any blog post about it, so I’ll rectify that ~10 years later as Microsoft gets ready to release Windows 11.

The backstory is that lawyers sent a form to employees asking if they had our permission to use our names in marketing materials. I said it was fine with me, not expecting to see my name anywhere either because they wouldn’t use it or because I’d never see it since there are so many different products.

Fast forward a couple years and I started seeing my name everywhere because they used it for some marketing shots in Windows 8. You can still see some of the news stories, as shown in the example from CNN below.

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.