Probably the best chapter so far, thank you! I can literally feel anxiety through it and I can only imagine what it was to make all those bold calls you and the team had to make with all the external pressure and uncertainty of late 90s. Great time and memories.
Are you going to write something about Office 2007 and the ribbon? It must be a great story too and thriller as well. I still remember myself asking people around what is the most used command in the Office UX. Almost everyone was shocked with the reality :-)
Great chapter. Echo comments below that this is one of the best so far. It's interesting to read that platforms / systems were technology driven and apps were scenario driven. In retrospect, were the transplanted tech-driven discussions the right approach for Office at the time?
After switching to product management in my post-MSFT career and working at large companies in the Valley, I've found these companies to be very allergic to tech driven strategies, esp coming from the PM organization. Everything must "start with the end user" or "work backwards from the use cases". This helps prioritize investments to maximize user value but can also be short sighted when it comes to making deep investments in durable strategic technology.
Great chapter. Regarding Java for client apps it was extremely buggy. For example even basic elements like a scrollbar were too buggy to use, we had to write our own code from scratch for scrollbars for our java based Help viewer.
"On the face of it, releasing the browser that quickly did not seem risky—the biggest thing about browsers was that they were viewers, and if they crashed a user could revert to what they were reading. No work was lost, unlike if Word crashed."
You're reminding me of a conversation I had with pmarca on the way to our Developer's Conference at the Marin Civic Veterans Auditorium (I arranged to have him speak as part of our deal with NSCP) in 1995/6.
Marc asked, "Hey Gary, when is Autodesk going to start releasing products faster than once a year, like we do?". My response was, "when the only input we have to respond to is a text box entry and some clicks on our canvas, with the rest of the work just being output, we can do it.".
Probably the best chapter so far, thank you! I can literally feel anxiety through it and I can only imagine what it was to make all those bold calls you and the team had to make with all the external pressure and uncertainty of late 90s. Great time and memories.
Are you going to write something about Office 2007 and the ribbon? It must be a great story too and thriller as well. I still remember myself asking people around what is the most used command in the Office UX. Almost everyone was shocked with the reality :-)
Great chapter. Echo comments below that this is one of the best so far. It's interesting to read that platforms / systems were technology driven and apps were scenario driven. In retrospect, were the transplanted tech-driven discussions the right approach for Office at the time?
After switching to product management in my post-MSFT career and working at large companies in the Valley, I've found these companies to be very allergic to tech driven strategies, esp coming from the PM organization. Everything must "start with the end user" or "work backwards from the use cases". This helps prioritize investments to maximize user value but can also be short sighted when it comes to making deep investments in durable strategic technology.
Great chapter. Regarding Java for client apps it was extremely buggy. For example even basic elements like a scrollbar were too buggy to use, we had to write our own code from scratch for scrollbars for our java based Help viewer.
"On the face of it, releasing the browser that quickly did not seem risky—the biggest thing about browsers was that they were viewers, and if they crashed a user could revert to what they were reading. No work was lost, unlike if Word crashed."
You're reminding me of a conversation I had with pmarca on the way to our Developer's Conference at the Marin Civic Veterans Auditorium (I arranged to have him speak as part of our deal with NSCP) in 1995/6.
Marc asked, "Hey Gary, when is Autodesk going to start releasing products faster than once a year, like we do?". My response was, "when the only input we have to respond to is a text box entry and some clicks on our canvas, with the rest of the work just being output, we can do it.".
Steven, one thing that surprised me back then was the lack of support for PDF output from Office, can you explain why?