13 Comments
Feb 22, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

In the Excel team, on a lark, after shipping Excel 2.0, we all sent our resumes to Lotus to apply for a job. We all received rejection letters and proudly posted them on our relight windows.

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Feb 23, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

I was the VP-Marketing at NeXT in 1991 and 1992, working for Steve. We completely pivoted our marketing after I arrived, punting on trying to sell to prosumers and focusing 100% on businesses and government building mission critical custom apps and wanting to deploy them on a Mac-like workstation. That was our niche, and we doubled down on OOP, Interface Builder, DBKit, etc. We really focused on Sun as our competition, not Windows and certainly not OS/2. We launched a crazy ad campaign in the WSJ pushing the video, and it not only worked, it really pissed off Scott McNealy, who accused Steve and I of "immature marketing". Perhaps my proudest accomplishment as a marketer. Here is the video:

https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg

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Feb 23, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

Also, in 1992, Steve and Jim Allchin both appeared (separately) at "ObjectWorld". Steve gave our awesome pitch/demo, which included smoke and a SubZero-sized Teradata coming up on a riser. Allchin came on stage and called Steve "Pinocchio". I am not making this up.

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Feb 22, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

My favorite relight artifact was a 'Zappa for President' bumper sticker. I left it there, on my next office move, and was delighted to see it a few years later stuck to one of those gray Helpdesk carts.

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Feb 28, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

I was definitely on the outside during all of this. I had ended my first tour at Xerox and decided to become a nano-sized ISV, working first with CP/M-80. My gigs were actually with local enterprises and only a couple had me code--badly, I did publish a patch to Turbo Pascal (that I teased Anders about years later) and also a version of the CP/M command processor called EZCPR that was a load-and-stay-resident fixture. It was free-ware. A guy who published a manual for it, which he sold along with the disc, asked me to add some extensions that his customers wanted. Didn't offer me a dime. Stopped me in my tracks. I just gave up.

I was a big Borland fan, starting with Turbo Pascal and moving to Turbo C and also Paradox. I remember Phillipe being hostile to C++, but then BCC. Cool thing was templates for making CUA applications that built easily and ran on Windows, not Cmd.exe, something VS never seemed to get right (but maybe Microsoft Terminal and related APIs have finally made up for that).

On CompuServe, the closest we got to StackOverflow in the day, Borland had great presence and encouragement of forums. Microsoft came late to that, essentially requiring proof-of-purchase to play. Microsoft corrected rather quickly though. I suspect that this was not delegated to V-badges as too much developer-facing stuff has been recently. This was the era of the Apple 2e, and those fans were relentless.

I now understand the dog-food problem better with respect to developer tools. I fear it made the tools slanted to folks who needed to build Windows and bulky Microsoft apps though. As far as I am concerned, the killer developer bloat case was and is windows.h. Forget about dependencies. In my thinking, compiled headers are the wrong solution to a real problem. The Borland lean-ness is missed.

Of course, Borland would miss windows for getting Windows versions of Paradox (oh, hi there Windows Office Access) and a Windows-generating Turbo Pascal (oops, hello Java and eventually .NET). That was hard to watch. That son-of-Turbo Delphi continues to have adherents is remarkable.

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stevesi great book so far. looking back in history, i wonder how much time we all could have saved if we had invested more resources in better dev tools and build farms. think of all the time spent waiting around for compiles, link, build, and source control, and cross dev transfers. Or even just a way to run an application in protected mode where you could fault on dereferencing a null pointer. If an SDE was 40k, then it should of been easy to buy racks stuffed with 40k of PCs but that wasn’t the thinking and budgeting made it almost impossible. It’d be interesting to see a historical chart of the round trip time to make a single source change, compile/link and see it running

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I am surprised to hear Steven say that the app teams and Excel in particular were looking in any serious way at the Borland tools. The reality was the CSL compiler had a raft of special features and our only hope of moving to a commercial tool was getting the Microsoft C team to add the features we needed. This was the first set of requirements that came from being the earliest GUI app developers. Because of the early performance constraints a lot of "tricks" were used that became barriers to moving to commercial tools. Eventually this was all ironed out, but it was thought to be quite a barrier at the time. About this time the application code size was starting to press the limits of the CSL P-Code system and we really needed commercial tools.

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