Microsoft Did A Really Nice Thing And Replaced A Bunch Of Stolen PCs At SXSW

Digiday/John McDermottMicrosoft gave coder Ashley Mooney a new Windows PC

The poor folks who joined the StartupBus hackathon thought their South By Southwest adventure would be ruined when a thief stole their computers.

The StartupBus is an annual invitation-only event where coders build a startup in the time it takes to drive to the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Once at the show, they present their idea to angel investors. This year, the bus was traveling from Florida.

The coders were scheduled to pitch their ideas on Tuesday. But in the wee hours of Sunday night, the house they were staying at in Austin got robbed and "tens of thousands of dollars" of laptops were stolen. Mitch Neff, the Bus' organizer tweeted about it a 3 a.m., Digiday's John McDermott reports.

Lucky for the StartupBus, Microsoft has been monitoring a tweet string called "#sxwproblems."

It's been watching that string so it can sweep in with heroic acts such as replacing lost, stolen or broken iPhones with Windows phones.

In this case, Microsoft delivered a bunch of Surface tablets and Dell and HP laptops that run on Windows 8.1. The company also gave the coders shoes from Creative Recreation and Herschel backpacks, McDermott reports.

The stolen laptops were mostly Macs, the coders said, but they were happy to get the Windows replacements.

Here's a Vine video that shows the happy delivery.