I am tired from looking at all the stuff on the screen. Yikes it is overwhelming. But boy it is like a goldmine. –Me in email about early Outlook to a member of the team
At COMDEX 95, Bill's keynote showed off a lot of what Steven is getting to around the desire for everyone in the company to want to provide the optimal 'shell' to productivity work. The Project X demo my team pulled together (mentioned in earlier posts) served as the center piece to communicate some of these ideas.
The whole video is worth watching (especially video conferencing from a phone booth!), but at this juncture Bill is talking about how 'objects' could play a role in 'simplifying' the desktop. He goes on to show a 'rather cluttered desktop' where documents are clustered around subjects on the desktop.
The 'graph' along the bottom that Bill describes is actually a timeline of all the productivity tasks conducted in Office and the Windows shell. It's what became 'the Journal' in Outlook that Steven includes above as a screenshot. We visited a 911 call center in the early 2000s that was still using it!
In the current version of Windows you can see that vision is still alive today. Typing <windows+tab>. The timeline scrolls vertically, but in 1995 we imagined it scrolling horizontally -- like Project's Gannt chart. The graph in the background that Bill triggered off of wasn't sales figures, but an indication of the amount of time spent on individual files or tasks.
I joined Ren/Outlook in early summer 1995 as a college hire, so reading all of the backstory is fascinating. Learning the ins and outs of Microsoft was hard enough as a newbie, and then layered in was all of the Capone vs. Outlook stuff was very confusing. But on the other hand, I got to go to a raging party (on day 4 of my employment) at BrianMac’s house, the biggest house I had ever seen in my life. A pool, kegs of beer, and a home movie room with a laserdisc player.
Two fun Outlook v1 stories. Maybe you remember these Steven. We were just about to ship a major milestone (I think Beta1, I can’t quite remember which) As a joke, a developer swapped out the Outlook boot screen and instead showed a hilarious and unflattering photo of Brian Valentine (head of Exchange and Capone) in a hula skirt and coconuts from some previous ship party. He was not a small guy, so the photo was meant to embarrass. The dev thought he was checking this photo into the internal build but screwed up the checkin and it went into the Beta 1 official build. It was found before we sent out the CDs but was a major big deal and embarrassment to the Outlook team. And it also made the Exchange team hate us even more 😃
The second story was that after Outlook v1 shipped, the Exchange team had spun up their successor app/code name called “Highlander” which came from the movie of the same name, and the movie tag line was “There can only be one”, implying the Highlander team’s goal was to kill Outlook and there would ultimately only be 1 mail client. And one wonders where the famous meme org structure of Microsoft pointing guns at each other comes from...
Either way, I had a total blast on the Ren team and it was a great experience to start at Microsoft, and long term Outlook did indeed become a bedrock for Office.
Love these stories. I definitely remember the Highlander project and "there can be only one". I thought I had written about that one but guess not. Thank you for adding it here.
The rivalry was definitely top of mind for me. I was a mess. But all part of the rich history. Thank you for sharing.
In my opinion, this section did not come across as clearly as earlier sections. I found myself re-reading certain paragraphs to be sure I was getting the point you were trying to make.
At COMDEX 95, Bill's keynote showed off a lot of what Steven is getting to around the desire for everyone in the company to want to provide the optimal 'shell' to productivity work. The Project X demo my team pulled together (mentioned in earlier posts) served as the center piece to communicate some of these ideas.
https://youtu.be/o0O0Xjpjvfc?t=1746
The whole video is worth watching (especially video conferencing from a phone booth!), but at this juncture Bill is talking about how 'objects' could play a role in 'simplifying' the desktop. He goes on to show a 'rather cluttered desktop' where documents are clustered around subjects on the desktop.
The 'graph' along the bottom that Bill describes is actually a timeline of all the productivity tasks conducted in Office and the Windows shell. It's what became 'the Journal' in Outlook that Steven includes above as a screenshot. We visited a 911 call center in the early 2000s that was still using it!
In the current version of Windows you can see that vision is still alive today. Typing <windows+tab>. The timeline scrolls vertically, but in 1995 we imagined it scrolling horizontally -- like Project's Gannt chart. The graph in the background that Bill triggered off of wasn't sales figures, but an indication of the amount of time spent on individual files or tasks.
I joined Ren/Outlook in early summer 1995 as a college hire, so reading all of the backstory is fascinating. Learning the ins and outs of Microsoft was hard enough as a newbie, and then layered in was all of the Capone vs. Outlook stuff was very confusing. But on the other hand, I got to go to a raging party (on day 4 of my employment) at BrianMac’s house, the biggest house I had ever seen in my life. A pool, kegs of beer, and a home movie room with a laserdisc player.
Two fun Outlook v1 stories. Maybe you remember these Steven. We were just about to ship a major milestone (I think Beta1, I can’t quite remember which) As a joke, a developer swapped out the Outlook boot screen and instead showed a hilarious and unflattering photo of Brian Valentine (head of Exchange and Capone) in a hula skirt and coconuts from some previous ship party. He was not a small guy, so the photo was meant to embarrass. The dev thought he was checking this photo into the internal build but screwed up the checkin and it went into the Beta 1 official build. It was found before we sent out the CDs but was a major big deal and embarrassment to the Outlook team. And it also made the Exchange team hate us even more 😃
The second story was that after Outlook v1 shipped, the Exchange team had spun up their successor app/code name called “Highlander” which came from the movie of the same name, and the movie tag line was “There can only be one”, implying the Highlander team’s goal was to kill Outlook and there would ultimately only be 1 mail client. And one wonders where the famous meme org structure of Microsoft pointing guns at each other comes from...
Either way, I had a total blast on the Ren team and it was a great experience to start at Microsoft, and long term Outlook did indeed become a bedrock for Office.
Love these stories. I definitely remember the Highlander project and "there can be only one". I thought I had written about that one but guess not. Thank you for adding it here.
The rivalry was definitely top of mind for me. I was a mess. But all part of the rich history. Thank you for sharing.
In my opinion, this section did not come across as clearly as earlier sections. I found myself re-reading certain paragraphs to be sure I was getting the point you were trying to make.
Sorry. I will endeavor to do better.