Year: 2010

The year was closing out and my experience on the incubation team had been a tremendous success.  In fact so much so they had decided to make it into a real group with funding and a new manager.  Greta was not going to take the role so she was passing it on to a new manager, Linda Griffin.  Anyone who ever met Linda did not forget her.  I had actually done an informational with her a few years earlier.  A petite woman, who dressed well, wore lot’s of make up, smoked like a chimney and talked very fast she would end up being one of the best managers I ever had in my career.  Because beneath all that material exterior, she did something unique in management, she cared about her people.  The team would expand as we added in addition to the ISP team a Lotus Notes compete team and Sun Microsystems compete team.  The two teams were targeting the IBM and Sun reseller channels.

Since we were turning into a new year at Microsoft, July, we started off this new team in Orlando at Microsoft’s annual Global Sales Conference.  In my opinion this would be Microsoft at its peak.  Going into this conference we had every reason to be sky-high – the stock was continuing its climb up, we had competitor’s on their death beds – WordPerfect, Borland, Novell, Netscape,  – where ever we went Microsoft was the serpent waiting to strike its next victim.  It seemed like we could do no wrong, as the competition just crumbled at our feet.

The event was at the Disney compound – most of the sessions took place in the Swan Hotel, I was staying at the Boardwalk hotel.  I am not big into vacationing at trendy resorts and have actually never been to Disneyland or Disney World, however having called on Disney as a sales rep throughout my career at Microsoft I can say they run a first-rate resort

The format every morning we would start with exec talks, go to break out rooms and end with some exec talks.  A few were memorable.  In those days Ballmer was still the Sales guy.  He would get up and talk about how well we did  and then announce next years quota (what we were telling Wall Street).  The Global Summit to this days always lands the week we announce our yearly earnings.  After which the sales reps would yell, “it’s too low, more, more..”.  No one ever does that now,  Ballmer also had a GM come help with a demo.  I cannot remember what.  The GM was a guy named Pieter Knook.  As Steve ws talking Pieter drove th demo, until it crashed.  Steve kept talking and Pieter left the stage.  When Steve turned to ask Pieter he saw no one, but just uttered “Pieter..Pieter??”  The rest of the conference had a slogan, “Whatever you do at Microsoft, just don’t Knook it”.   Pieter went on to land some senior exec roles at Microsoft and is now an exec at Vodafone.

Microsoft had earlier in the year released interactive Barney.  A talking Barney doll for kids.  This would lead to a legendary presentation by Microsoft Office Exec Pete Higgins.  Pete was kind of a drab guy to listen to, but on this day with the help of Barney he caught fire.  For those who are not technical  you may not get the humor, but try to follow.   Pete went through the normal here is Office and here is what is coming down the pipe.  We got the standard demo’s.  It was stuff I have seen, it seems like, a million times before and a million times since.  He then ended with our lovable friend Barney.  He did a cute Barney demo where they chatted.  he then showed the Powerpoint of what was to come “Professional Barney”, “Network Barney” and “Cluster Barney”.  As the crowd roared with laughter a chant began “Barney! Barney! Barney!”.  Pete was walking at a fast pace all over the stage with Barney held high over his head, egging everyone on.  Pete would retire not that long after, but it was one hell of a way to be remembered.   Barney, well he joined Microsoft Bob and they are quite happy together. 

One day I had a little extra time so a few of us went down to check out the pool.  As part of ou little gift bag we got some sun glasses.  It was Orlando so it was bright and hot.  All seemed to be well.  As I sat there by the pool I noticed some other Microsoft folks there from one of the foreign subsidiaries.  Some were on the pool and one was looking at me saying something.  He was actually saying it in Danish and funny thing I speak Danish.  So I understood everything, “look at that idiot with the Microsoft sun glasses on sitting over there, he forgot to take the sticker off the glasses”.  At this point it seemed like a worthwhile endeavour to go introduce myself….in Danish.  I did just that to the guy in the pool.  If you could have seen the look on his face, suddenly he looked like a meek, wet rat as a look of shock came over his face.   His name was Hans Gufler and we remain friends to this day.  If someone I didn’t know came up to me and made fun of me everyday and I ended up being friends with that person I would welcome an insult a day.

Well we reached the last day and as usual one more exec speech before the show (Kool and the Gang).  As usual we got an hour break and then went back to the Swan for the Bill Gates keynote.  It was like a rock concert as everyone lined up before the keynote and waited for the doors to open.  The doors swung open and everyone tied to get as close as they could.  We then sat and awaited the highlight of the week.  Similar to a rock concert the lighting darkens and the stage lights start to flash.  In the back of the stage a ring appears with smoke and up pops the shadowed image of Bill, hands folded.  I remember quite distinctly that Bill came out and said “I don’t have any Powerpoint’s today so I am just going to sit here and talk”.  He pulled up a stool and spoke of all that was happening in the industry and where Microsoft was positioned to succeed.  The audience was entranced.  It was similar to a father speaking to his children and telling them all that he knew and helping guide his children to greater success.  It was Bill at his best and the most memorable talk I ever saw him give.

The conference party happened.  We had a dinner before hand.  It was the last time I would see Bill seated with the field reps fo dinner.  For the first time I noticed security around Bill. I don’t remember much from the party except for my new manager Linda hitting some guy with a beer bottle (I said she was entertaining).  The next day I flew home.  My flight was delayed by 5 hours and I had to be re-routed through Dallas.  My experiences with Delta Airlines have never been that good.  I left the conference confident and cocky about Microsoft’s future.  But things would change the following year, slowly Microsoft would begin to lose the innocence that had made it so much fun, but in Jly of 1997 it was still a pretty awesome place to work

Welcome back and Happy New year everyone.  I missed my blogging efforts over the holidays so here is the first release of 2010.

It was 1997 and I had been in my job as a channel sales rep for about 6 months when I was offered an interesting opportunity. My direct boss was Cindy Ranz, who was employee number 16 at Microsoft. but it was her peer Jeff Browne who would offer me up a chance to join an incubation team of telesales reps.   A group known as the Internet Customer Unit (ICU) had been formed about a year earlier and was led by Cameron Myrvold (brother of the founder of Microsoft research Nathan).  As was noted at the MGX in Montreal all things were focused on competing against Netscape.  The issue around the internet was Microsoft really did not know a whole lot about the makeup of the internet community.  One thing that was apparent was that everyone and their mother could start their own Internet Service Provider (ISP) business.  The decision was made by ICU to purchase a list of ISP’s for the US and Canada and have a small group of Telesales reps call down on them and basically find out what makes them tick.  I was one of the reps selected.  It would launch one of the funnest times I ever had in my career.

The team that was selected would reunite me with two of my former teammates from my days in DST; Steve Bissell and Ken Fiore.  Our manager was a bright young woman named Greta George. We were given lists of ISP’s, broken out by region – I had Central and Canada.  Ken had the East and Steve got the West.  There were many ISP’s, I think my list was over 1000.  Like any new industry there were a lot of start-ups. Beyond calling down on these ISP’s and doing intelligence gathering  we had products to promote and sell.  For the browser we had the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and the Microsoft Commercial Internet System (MCIS).

The IEAK was a pretty simple tool.  Microsoft had decided with its browser that we would allow ISP’s to customize the browser with really just two things:

1. The ISP could set the start-up page (Netscape defaulted to their website)
2. The ISP could put their logo in the browser

The MCIS product was a suite of 8 different server products.  I am going to forgo a detailed description of what they did but simply say that the problem Microsoft had at the time with our server products is that none were designed withe the internet in mind.  One product in the suite was an Internet Mail server, the reason we had this product in MCIS was simple.  Microsoft’s Exchange Server could not scale to support the internet nor was it architected to support the internet.  I think the previous point highlights a significant challenge then and moving forward for a company the size of Microsoft. When change happens in technology it happens quickly and companies are faced with a challenge to start with a new product or try to nut and bolt together what you already have.

We started our jobs and were basically thrown on the phones to start calling and selling.  What quickly became apparent was that the browser was not really that interesting, but something else…Open Source.  We quickly learned as a team a whole new list of words and acronyms that we had not been exposed to before,  At the time DSL and cable modems were just being discussed in the industry for eth most part it was modem banks and ISDN lines (56k).  Every ISP had a modem back to receive all the incoming calls.  When a user was on the internet their phone was busy.  the technology these ISP’s used was cheap as in free.  They used things like Linux as the OS  or they used one of two flavors BSDi or Free BSD.  The web server was almost always Apache.  The email was send mail.  For the most part all these things were free stuff you down loaded off the internet.  Another thing is these systems tended to be one-dimensional.  To a Microsoft person it was a question of how could this be?  We were used to multi-tasking and running lots of applications at once.  These systems seemed stupid.  But they did offer one thing: they were secure and stable.  A lot of the  calls were interesting as the Open Source community tended to talk to us like we were yesterday’s news. Initially it was a defensive posture we took (Steve, Ken and I).  How dare they talk to Microsoft in such a condescending manner?  Do they not know who we are?  We invented the software industry.  What is this communist plot to create a paradise for the software community by sharing valuable IP?  We are the definition of the capitalist dream, Open Source still believes the Berlin Wall is standing.  Looking back Microsoft as a company, was still in its very, very arrogant phase.  When you are winning every battle it is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s a necessary attribute to maintain success.  However looking at things from the other side we can look back to Sun Tzu and quote “When confronted by superior numbers it is wise to change the battle field”.  In the packaged software business you were not going to beat Microsoft, but this idea of free stuff was new and could impact Microsoft’s margins.  At this point though Ken, Steve and I were on the cutting edge.  The vast majority of people at Microsoft did not know what was happening on the internet. When you are in the edge in technology you ware in one of the most exciting places in all of business.

I will add here there are a few things I noticed early on I did not like about the internet.  This idea of anonymous I did not like.  I heard people on McNeil – Lehrer, hype it as great.  When I see what people sa and on the internet behind their secret identity it strikes me as weak and cowardly.  In many cases they are doing illegal activities, but in others they just want degrade and crucify people in a way they are simply too scared to do in person.  If you have an opinion stand behind it.

A second thing was in calling these ISP’s a lot of them were dealing with pornography.  This to me just illustrates that the adult industry will always be on the cutting edge of these types of changes in video distribution.  As the writer Paul Theroux recounts in his travel books when talking about pornography, “Much of it is disgusting, but they do it because there is a market for it”.  It’s legal and it’s capitalism.  At 28.8k modem speeds some people must really have wanted the content.

During this time we would forge relationships and travel to meet customers.  This would really launch my career on planes.  We had a lot of visibility in the company, which would cause Greta great stress.  People were very interested to hear what we knew.  Greta and I would talk a lot in her office enduring this time.  She was having to pull spreadsheets together and Powerpoint to discuss the data we were collecting.  I think a lot of that stress was brought on by the fact that an even though we were capturing  a lot if data I am not sure how good it was and it required a lot of assumptions to be made.  Greta then would present to people like she knew, something I don’t think she was comfortable with.  Even in today’s Microsoft with all the date being collected  it still requires a lot of assumptions to be made.  Greta was just ahead of her time.

As a team we had fun.  We went on a golf outing at Mount Si.  I am not a  golfer so take this opinion with a grain of salt.  I do not think the golf course is the most challenging course in Washington, however on a sunny day it really is beautiful to stand in the shadow of that mountain and enjoy golf and beers with great co-workers.  We went out to eat at Chandlers Crab House , very good sea food.  For those making a trip to Seattle I recommend.  Especially during Copper River salmon season  I got  one of the best reviews in my career and one of the largest raises. My career was moving forward I was happy at home with my wife and new house.   Life was very good at Microsoft.