041. Scaling the Office Infrastructure and Platform

“I don’t know how to read this without getting concerned.” –BillG replying to an Office96 status report April 1995

Perhaps more than any particular feature in what would become Office 97, though there were a lot of features, the biggest innovation was building the organization and culture supporting a shared infrastructure and platform team. Before Office 97, Microsoft decidedly switched to selling Office, yet we continued to build Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and w…