051. HTML: Opportunity, Disruption, or Wedge
“Allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.” —Email from BillG
While we knew the time was wrong to build a whole new Office out of one of the new disruptive technologies, we did need to arrive at a strategy for HTML. After the debacle of the file format changes for Office 97, the allure of HTML was everywhere. The enterprise customers we intended to impress were fed up with the traditional (and ever-changing) binar…