Category: Microsoft

Wow this is a long entry but I think for those who are less technically inclined it ill be a more entertaing read.  Well it had been over a year and I had taken a new job in DST.  We were attending a local internal conference at the Washington Convention Center.  They were set to announce where the first Microsoft Global Sales Summit was going to be held.  The executive who was set to announce this was a man named Mike Appe.  He was pretty senior in the company though I cannot remember what he did.  The final candidates were Cleveland and San Diego.  Somehow the former was a joke which Mike played up.  The winner was San Diego and the best part was I got to go.

By this time I had been at Microsoft for a little over 2 years and was brimming with confidence.  I even had a  girlfriend.  I still have that girlfriend.  I had my corporate Amex and booked my travel and flew down to San Diego.  On my plane was Mike Appe and his admin.  They worked closely together.  We were staying out at the Grand Coronado.  I got there late and checked in and went outside to the pool.  All my co-workers were pool side wearing bikini’s.  This was not what I envisioned a corporate event to be but I was ok with it.  As we progress the reader will find this was not a typical corporate event.

Since it was 1994 it was a World Cup year so some folks had come up with the idea of doing a Microsoft Worl Cup and worked with the hotel to use the grounds for a make shift filed.  Got some goals and a ref and were good to go.  Each subsidiary formed a team including my HQ Sales org. Luckily (in hind site) my ankles were pretty much shot from my spring soccer season so I could not play.  The field was well-groomed however it was not flat but kind of a series of little rolling hills.  By the end of the week there were so many people on crutches it was rather tragic in a humorous sort of way.  In one of HQ Sales games they played Australia.  In our defense was Shawn Sanford, a really big muscle-bound dude.  He was a pretty good soccer player too.  A rough Aussie Sales rep was chasing a ball down in our end when he met Shawn.  Bone to bone.  I was about 100 feet away but I heard the snap loud and clear.  The Aussie spent the rest of the week in the hospital.  He won a bunch of awards at the summit.   I spoke with him years later.  His flight home I found out was very painful.

One night Microsoft rented out the San Diego zoo.  A bunch of teams got together and the  had organized a Microsoft parade.  The people in the parade had costumes and floats.  They were all Microsoft employees.   Apparently this was a big Microsoft Sales Summit tradition.  The big piece was Mike Appe and his admin dressed up as the Adam’s Family, complete with car.  We had food at the zoo.  They had chicken on a stick!!  The second best thing to a Microsoft box lunch.  The only bummer was hardly any of the animals were out.  Another day they just gave us the day off to go do stuff in San Diego.  So a bunch of telesales folks renter a car and went to the beach.  Kevin Turner would never approve of a company having fun like this.

The conference itself was very entertaining.  The theme was “Heroes”.  So every exec who spoke was dressed up as a super hero.  The best was Mike Maples, he headed the Office Division, and was a big guy, I estimate an easy 300 lbs.  He ws floppy disk man.  He wore some black spandex with a helmet made of tin foil.  He was covered in floppy disks (remember this is 1994 – 3.5 and 5.25).  Standing on the stage the heat must have been incredible.  I watched Mike as he slowly melted.  He took off the helmet rather quickly as that seemed to be absorbing the heat and he seemed to be getting faint.  We also had this new guy, Jim Allchin, present.  Jim is a Microsoft legend.  He came from Banyan Vines.  He spoke first about coming to Microsoft and asking the question, “Why would I work for the company that created DOS?” A fair question.  He then stated talking about a new products release, Microsoft BackOffice.  BackOffice was Windows NT Advanced Server, SMS Server, SNA Server, and Exchange Server with Client Access Licenses (CAL) – I shall say no more as I am sure some people’s eyes are glazing over.  Jim with his intense demeanor and silver hair and piercing Rasputin like eyes frankly scared the shit out of everybody.  He was no hero, he was a villan.  I saw the Ballmer bounce for the first time.  It would get better later.  Jeff Raikes was the MC for the event – I think it was his first time in such a high-profile position.  It was painful to watch him, but as time would go by he would improve a lot. As my roommate (Brian Copps – the Cowboy) and I went back to the hotel later we were in the elevator with Jim Allchin.  It was scary.  The last exec to speak was of course Bill gates.  Hsi hero was Captain Microsoft.  he walked out with just a cape on.  He took it off as soon as he got to the podium.  When you are Bill you do what you want.  I admit I was always a big fan of Bill’s presentations, but only when he talked about his industry perspective.  When he did product demo’s of Windows 95 or something else he was boring.  The one thing I took from his speech was when he spoke of SQl Server versus Oracle, he felt long trem Oracle was vulnerable.  Still waiting on that one.  They have proven a very worthy competitor.

The last evening was the big party following the event.  It was a black tie formal event.  Microsoft had a company come on site to fit all the men for tuxedo’s.  I had brought my own suit.  The women were all dressed in very elegant and sexy dresses.  Before the dinner, we all stood outside and had drinks.  I cannot remember who I was talking with but I turned around and right behind me with his back to me was Bill Gates.  We were let into the great big tent that had housed us for 5 days.  There was a bat mobile onstage and little islands set up around the dinner area in between tables.  On these islands were dancers in super hero costumes.    They danced around us as we had dinner.   It was a surreal kind of experience.  We had assigned tables and I don’t remember a single person I sat with or had drinks with.  I was just kind of mesmerized by the atmosphere and all the free booze.  I went back to my room around midnight as I had an early flight to catch and wanted to get back to my girlfriend.  A petite little sweetheart named Jean.  I know from this MGX and later a lot of what would be deemed sinful behavior took place.  Relationships destroyed, some renewed, some began.  The difference between this and college is when you are paid you can afford lawyers.  There are far better romance novel writers than myself who can write in detail about this type of stuff.  Plus I am a morning person so the stuff that happened late at night I only heard about second-hand.

The thing I remember most about those days is how amateur the whole production was.  It was innocent.  It sure as hell was comical. In short it was absolutely fantastic.

I hope everyone has had a Happy Thanksgiving, it’s a nice American holiday where I do not need to worry about political or religious sensitivity, we just get together and eat lots of food.  Even Helen, one of the owners of my favorite Greek restaurant in Seattle, the Continental,  says it’s the one holiday she really liked when she emigrated from Greece to the United States because you just got family together and enjoyed a meal.  Well now back to my life at Microsoft.  I thought we would fast forward just a little to my next job at Microsoft on the Developer Sales Team (DST).  The group was a pre sales phone line for handling customers technical question on specific products.

The Developer Sales Team was where I really cut my teeth in better understanding technology.  In hindsight it was amazing that they would even give me the job.  The key question in my interview was how do you redistribute a Visual Basic application – in those days you could not compile VB code it required you to redistribute a runtime DLL.  I answered correctly. I know for some people following my blog that they may sound brilliant or really smart, but I had not written any code since high school ( still have not).   But that was how things worked in those days.  A co-worker, Debwa had started in Windows Tech Support – here’s your book, have fun.  In those days the question was could you learn?  If yes, you were thrown to the wolves. It was cool not corporate.  At the time the list ot really technical products was not that long and the team was divided into three groups shortly after I joined; Database, Developer and Networking.  Over time I would answer inbound phone calls as a part of my job and learn different technologies on the fly.  Compared to today, the products were not many.  For Databases we had three (Access, FoxPro and SQL Server).  For Networking we had Lan Manager and Windows for Workgroups 3.1).  For Developer Tools we had a bit more (Fortran, Cobol, Visual Basic, MASM, & Visual C++ 1.0).  This was all before the internet.  Online Services we supported then were GENIE, Compuserve and AOL.  It was a cool job early on and one I was thankful for and remain thankful to this day.

On the horizon a couple of things were being talked about.  One was an effort by developer genius Dave Cutler on a new technology called Windows NT.  The second was a beta product code-named “Chicago”.  On the competitive front IBM had launched OS/2 2.0.  A new competitor I will talk about in a later blog was Novell.  They were the kings of file and print.

Internally the Corporate HQ Sales organization had been taken over by Rick Devenutti.  Rick would eventually rise to CIO and head Microsoft Consulting.  As  I write this blog some execs will come under great scrutiny.  Rick will not be one of them.  He took time to understand the org.  He had a cubicle on each floor so he could sit with the phone reps..  In my group he sat next to me.  It seemed every time he sat next to me I got the irate customer.  I remember the first offsite we did in Seattle at the Sheraton we must have had 500 people there.  I think Rick took away from this what do all these people do and why do we pay them?  He started outsourcing.  I know this is a sensitive subject for some, but in general I think it makes business sense and now with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) I am a strong believer it is here to stay, so in short for those  against it, like my wife, “get over it”. It will also take a larger role in all our lives moving forward.

So what were the big issues of the day? SQL Server was trying to go after Sybase.  In hind sight it still could not scale very high.  When do I use VB versus C++?  I am not going to spend a lot of time here as I do not want to bore the audience.  The thing I remember most are the people I worked with who were young and energetic.  Many who I am still friends with to this day.  Others met my fate.  It was also during this time I was called for jury duty.  I would meet a beautiful young girl (ok  she was 2 years older than me) named Jean.  She ended up being my wife.  Shortly after I would attend my first Microsoft Global Sales Summit in San Diego.  Which will bring us to our next topic as we move away from technical stuff and talk key executives, parties, drinking, scandal, an ill-fated Microsoft soccer tourney, etc..Take care everyone and until next time good night and good luck.

It’s probably easy to look at Microsoft and say it is Billg’s company, but there were a lot of other great figures that had lasting influences on who and what Microsoft is today.  Three I will highlight todat from my early years are Jon Shirley, Frank Gaudette and Joachim Kempin.

Back in 1987 when I was still in college I temped in the mail room at Microsoft.  My first day in the mail room (there were only 4 buildings in Redmond in those days) it was one of the girls last day.  Apparently the mail room supervisor had arranged for her father to come down and talk to us.  Turns out her dad was Jon Shirley.  I did not know who he was but it was obvious he was important.  Jon would retire shortly after I joined but the stories of Jon were legendary.  There were other Presidents in Microsoft’s history.  We had a guy from Boeing, we had Rick Beluzzo from HP,but they would never mesh with Bill and Steve.  However Jon’s role was a bit different.  Having honed his skills for 25 years at Tandy he joined Microsoft in 1983.  He was the guy who really showed Bill and Steve the way to run a company.  I had the chance to talk with people during my career at Microsoft who worked with Jon and he was usually described as “tough as nails”.  Since he left the company no one has had the title of President and been successful.  The current list of Presidents head divisions (Robbie Bach, etc..) they are not Presidents in the classical sense.  My guess is Kevin Turner (current COO) will be given that power as Steve seems to really like him, not so sure the rest of the company does.  But in the history of Microsoft they can all try but no one will have the impact that Jon Shirley did as he put the basic business disciplines in place that enabled Microsoft to succeed.

The next is Frank Gaudette, Microsoft CFO.  He was a character.  A tough Irishman from New York.  He was a boxer in his youth and a paratrooper in the Korean War.  He was the guy who took Microsoft public.  He was proud that he negotiated a nickel out of the opening share price when Microsoft did its IPO.  At the company meetings Frank always put on a show – being shot out of cannons, coming out as a boxer, etc..  It was humorous as he was not a great speaker.  However when we spoke I always felt like I was listening to the Count from Sesame Street.  He would just talk numbers “One billion, that’s a big number, I like that number”.  All in all it was pretty enlightening.  The classic Frank story that has been shared around the halls of Microsoft forever is SteveB went in to talk to Frank and ot got so heated that Steve punched a hole in Franks wall.  Frank followed Steve out into the hall and said “you do that again I will throw you out myself”.  Those were the days.

Finally we have Joachim Kempin.  I can’t say I know a whole lot about this exec as he was always kind of  a mysterious figure, even at Microsoft.  He ran the OEM division and he was the one who locked down the OEM’s into their Microsoft contracts.  Anyone who follows Microsoft in detail knows about Joachim.   Some would say he put the “evil” in empire.  Rumors at Microsoft were tha Bill and Steve just let Joachim be.  They did not interfere in his business.  If you browse the net you will find internal emails from Joachim.  It’s apparent that if you ran Windows or Office, when you went to launch a product you had to go through Joachim for sign off on how you were going to price the product.  In those days the OEM division was outside of sales.  It was its own group and it was responsible for billions.  It was powerful.  From time to time other groups would do their own deals with the OEM’s.  If Joachim’s group found out that business was taken over and folded into the OEM division.  Do whatever deal you want with HP or Dell or Acer, but in the end the OEM division would own.  Arguments with Joachim were a one way street.

Well this has been probably my longest blog post to date.  I hope everyone enjoys the holidays.  There is still so much to cover and so much to discuss. Take care everyone.

Sorry for the delay but being unemployed is hard work.  Well back to products and my first year at Microsoft.  If you ask anybody what Microsoft’s biggest sellers are they will likely say 2 things.

1. Windows
2. Office

These two products have defined Microsoft for the past 15 years and resulted in billions of dollars in revenue. The first we discussed in an earlier blog the second was fueled by a couple of things:

1. Microsoft’s existing OEM relationships
2. Microsoft looked at its application set collectively not individually

On the, OEM front this was easy.  Microsoft already had relationships with all the major OEM’s, therefore it was easy to go in and up sell them on adding Office to their list of pre-installed applications with their PC’s.  Another thing that is a bit of a grey area to me but certainly there were enough internal hallway conversations to verify, the agreements that Microsoft had in place those days were very restrictive. A OEM could be penalized for shipping something other than Office with their PC’s.  In short Microsoft leveraged its positions on Windows to secure other applications.  Some might call that monopolistic behavior but that is a story for a later blog entry.

The second point was Microsoft’s vision for the workplace.  I think Microsoft’s chief competitors looked at customers as word processing customers, spreadsheet customers etc..Microsoft looked at the workspace holistically.  Chances are the worker who crunched numbers had to write documents, had to provide presentations and Microsoft provided it all.  I often thought during the nineties Microsoft’s success was due to a couple of things:

1. Microsoft’s vision and patience
2. Microsoft’s competitors incompetence

 I think those two things played out time and time again.  The first point was pure Billg.  He had the ability to say this is the way the world will be and everyone in the company would just follow.  And I mean everybody, from Steve Ballmer down to the bottom.  I mean me when I am referring to the bottom.  On the second point I think our competitors viewed this as a business, which was true, but in doing so they were missing the bigger picture.  I remember a quote from a famous venture capitol guy in Silicon Valley which was to potential venture capitalists, “When you invest in companies look at the technology and not the revenue, that is implied”.  That quote was post Dotcom, but I think it applied to where Microsoft was when I started.  Come up withh great ideas we will think about the revenue later.  That simply is how the tech business has to work.  Great idea will lead to revenue even if at first it is not apparent (there were a lot of search engines before Google).  That is how Microsoft operated in the early days and in the process we were defining how money would be made in the software business.  In the end it led to enterprise licensing scenarios, OEM licensing etc..all of which included Microsoft Office.  With each new licensing vehicle Office grew.  Heck Microsoft even was making tens of millions, hundreds and eventually billions on Microsoft Office for the Macintosh.  Before the end of eth decade Microsoft was a multi-billion dollar empire.  In an ever-changing environment I vie wit as Microsoft’s Achilles heal today, but then it was pure gold.  It was the easiest call I took as a customer service rep “Your looking at a spreadsheet?  You are looking at a word processor too?  Well then buy Office for less than what you pay for WordPerfect and Lotus we will throw in Microsoft PowerPoint”.   The beauty of that type of dialog is I did not view it as sales, it was just common sense.  Innocence is a great way to sell.  Good night everyone.

Now to a more fun topic, I had been at Microsoft a little over a month when it was time for my first corporate Christmas Party. The Microsoft X-Mas party in the early years was an event. It was held at the Washington Convention Center in downtown Seattle. It was first class and unlike the pathetic departmental X-Mas parties of today at Microsoft. Todays events are about schmoozing the boss, introducing your significant other to the big boss, and trying not to bore your significant other with shop talk. The old parties were an event bent on sin. In short really fun stuff.  My first event I got together with the old temps Jovanna, Andrea, and Steve to go to the party.  I was taking Jovanna and Andrea’s friend, Lisa, to the event.  Not a date I just had an extra ticket.  Lisa was from LA , who was a customer service manager and fallen in love with one of her reps.  I was a CS Rep and maybe…naah.  Amazing what you learn in short time after meeting someone.  The event was huge probably 5000 people.    Interesting that it was formal attire, very un Microsoft like.  By being so large you could pretty much do what you wanted since you rarely ran into any co-workers.  There was great food at every turn, the drinks were first-rate (beer, wine & cocktail..not cheap stuff either).  Each room had a theme, in fact the whole party had a theme.  I just cannot remember what it was in 1991.  It was a long evening.  I remember there were room parties as many people got a hotel room downtown and you would go hang out for a few drinks.  It was a surreal experience at the age of 25.  So many people I did not know, everything was free..the whole night was kind of a blur.  There would be one or two more parties like this before they would just drift off as a part of Microsoft folklore.  It was a cool experience and one I will never forget.  As I was talking the other day with someone who was there at Microsoft at the time, she stated “It was an event”…in a geeky glamorous sort of way.