The breadth of the Microsoft product line and the rapid turnover of core technologies all but precluded BillG from micro-managing the company in spite of the perceptions and lore around that topic. In less than 10 years the technology base of the business changed from the 8-bit BASIC era to the 16-bit MS-DOS era and to now the tail end of the 16-bit Windows era, on the verge of the Win32 decade. How did Bill manage this — where and how did he engage? This post introduces the topic and along with the next several posts we will explore some specific projects.
Please feel free to share this and subscribers, please join in the discussion.
Share
Back to 018. Microsoft’s Two Bountiful Gardens
At 38, having grown Microsoft as CEO from the start, Bill was leading Microsoft at a global scale that in 1993 was comparable to an industrial-era CEO. Even the legendary Thomas Watson Jr., son of the IBM founder, did not lead IBM until his 40s. Microsoft could never have scaled the way it did had BillG managed via a centralized hub-and-spoke system, with everything bottlenecked through him. In many ways, this was BillG’s product leadership gift to Microsoft—a deeply empowered organization that also had deep product conversations at the top and across the whole organization.
This video from the early 1980’s is a great introduction to the breadth of Microsoft’s product offerings, even at a very early stage of the company. It also features some vintage BillG voiceover and early sales executive Vern Raburn. (Source: Microsoft videotape)
Bill honed a set of undocumented principles that defined interactions with product groups. The times of legendary BillG reviews characterized by hardcore challenges and even insults had become, mostly, a thing of the past excepting the occasional sentimental outburst. More generally, they were a collective memory of hyper-growth moments any start-up experiences, only before the modern era when such stories were more commonly understood.
Much later in 2006, when BillG announced his intent to transition from full time Microsoft and part time philanthropy to full time philanthropy, many reporters surprised him by asking how Microsoft would continue without his coordination of technical strategy and oversight. But even in the early ’90s, at the height of the deepest and most challenging technology strategy questions, he never devoted the bulk of his time to micromanaging product development. He spent a good deal of time engaged with products, but there were far too many at too many stages of development to micro-manage them. In many ways this was the opposite of the approach Steve Jobs took, even if both were known for their own forms of challenging interactions. The most obvious contrast between the two was the breadth of the product line and the different market touchpoints.
Having grown up through Development Tools and Languages, I was familiar with Microsoft’s product line, but only as TA did it become clear how comparatively broad Microsoft had so quickly become. The software world was thought of through a lens of major categories: operating systems, tools and languages, networking, and applications, roughly mirroring Microsoft’s org chart. The latter was thought of as word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, databases, as well as assorted smaller categories. It was easy to identify leaders in each of those areas—names that were tip of the tongue at the time and most of which are no longer in the PC software space (IBM, Borland, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Aldus, Ashton Tate, and many more). The ah-ha moment in the early 1990s was the realization that no company on that list was competing in more than one category. Microsoft was hardly winning in every category. In fact, in most categories it was new entry, a distant second, or even third place, but the company was in every space. Bill was committed and patient. Microsoft was relentless. And Microsoft was focused on Windows.
BillG had fostered Microsoft with a grand vision to compete in every category of PC software, from some of the earliest days. With rare exceptions, no other company set out to do that. BillG led a deep technology strategy. It started with the operating system, supported by tools and languages, and then using those to build applications. This seemed simple enough. In fact, it is what IBM built for mainframes and DEC built for minicomputers.
... continue reading