I think it was when the Chicago team said it would RTM in April that there was a meeting with BillG about Office's RTM date. ChrisP repeated the "Windows + 30 days" ship date and then said, "September." Bill said, "So you're saying April + 30 days is September?" And Chris said, "In Windows date arithmetic, yes."
"Then one day after I joined the OPU team, PPathe, GM of Word, told me what he had started saying to the Word team. Whenever people complained about OPU he reminded the team “[T]he best feature we have for competing with WordPerfect is Excel.” He finally had his messaging that appealed to the Word-first zealots—they would win by having Excel be a great feature of Word. Brilliant"
I always pushed to release products on time, but even using the software developers own time estimates x 2 it would not be enough time. Surprising how software developers kept under estimating the time needed.
I’m beginning to wonder whether you chose to write on Substack instead of a book because of trauma from these multi-year release schedules! My company is on a quarterly release cadence and that still seems slow to me.
This all sounds painful, but I was fairly clued in by friends there and aware of most of this. I saw your pain as industry-wide and was amazed at some of the near sim-ship successes you had.
Being vocally self-critical is great, but I thought you all did a great job, all things considered.
I have been an executive at several companies, and I don't recall a single reorg being done just to "make things better" unless it means dealing with a poor leader situation in a short period of time. Maybe you're saying other parts of MSFT did the latter at times.
Instead, these are typically done to generate movement on new strategies, and in service of Conway's Law to a large degree. Everyone I've ever done or seen at my companies... including MSFT in DevDiv, was done in service of strategy. Then there were the ones we did to achieve "One Strategy" which were not successful, but that's a different topic I'm hoping you get to.
I think it was when the Chicago team said it would RTM in April that there was a meeting with BillG about Office's RTM date. ChrisP repeated the "Windows + 30 days" ship date and then said, "September." Bill said, "So you're saying April + 30 days is September?" And Chris said, "In Windows date arithmetic, yes."
"Then one day after I joined the OPU team, PPathe, GM of Word, told me what he had started saying to the Word team. Whenever people complained about OPU he reminded the team “[T]he best feature we have for competing with WordPerfect is Excel.” He finally had his messaging that appealed to the Word-first zealots—they would win by having Excel be a great feature of Word. Brilliant"
I love this, and am totally stealing it :)
I always pushed to release products on time, but even using the software developers own time estimates x 2 it would not be enough time. Surprising how software developers kept under estimating the time needed.
Wow, the enormous amount of coordination required.
I’m beginning to wonder whether you chose to write on Substack instead of a book because of trauma from these multi-year release schedules! My company is on a quarterly release cadence and that still seems slow to me.
This all sounds painful, but I was fairly clued in by friends there and aware of most of this. I saw your pain as industry-wide and was amazed at some of the near sim-ship successes you had.
Being vocally self-critical is great, but I thought you all did a great job, all things considered.
I have been an executive at several companies, and I don't recall a single reorg being done just to "make things better" unless it means dealing with a poor leader situation in a short period of time. Maybe you're saying other parts of MSFT did the latter at times.
Instead, these are typically done to generate movement on new strategies, and in service of Conway's Law to a large degree. Everyone I've ever done or seen at my companies... including MSFT in DevDiv, was done in service of strategy. Then there were the ones we did to achieve "One Strategy" which were not successful, but that's a different topic I'm hoping you get to.