My first visit to Japan was around a collaboration between XSoft and Hitachi Information Systems concerning application of the DMA model in a Japanese initiative to pilot a document-management system for cultural preservation, likely sponsored in connection with MITI. Hide Hasagawa was the host; he'd been on assignment to RCA back when RCA was making mainframes. My counterpart was Mitsuru Akizawa, who'd earned an MS at Stanford. I would meet others in Japan who'd been on US assignments between Fuji Xerox and Xerox in Rochester. There were similar arrangements with Rank Xerox at the time.
I was amazed about the cordiality. I have remained friends with Hide and Mitsuru all this time. When I last traveled to Japan, as a consultant, I gave a presentation on document-management standards at Fuji Xerox Information Systems and my wife Vicki, on her only time in Japan, sat in. She'd never seen me at work before. The FXIS President took us to dinner later. HIde took us around the Tokyo area.
That trip was a kind of pilgrimage for Vicki, a potter. We went to Moshiko where there had been a revival of Japanese folk pottery after World War II. And Kyoto was amazing for her as well.
One thing I learned about the Japanese. The Japanese might hurry, but they are not rushed. There's a difference in the awareness and attention. It was very noticeable when we returned to a boarding area at Narita. Suddenly everything felt frantic and anxious.
I once got lost on the streets of Tokyo. I came up from the subway at the wrong corner and was completely disoriented. Passers-by must have noticed. A woman attempted to help me, and then a young man came up, understood what building I was looking for, and then walked me to it. I have paid that back on the Summer streets of Seattle a few times.
I also learned how my Palo Alto colleagues thought the Japanese were pushy. I explained it to Mitsuru once. It was about making requests and there was nothing wrong with how he did it.
Concerning Ballmer, the first time I saw him was from the audience at a Redmond campus studio event about features of Windows for the home. I think it was about Media Center. I'm uncertain whether Xbox was a thing yet.
My sense that Microsoft was not managing to also be a consumer company arrived when Microsoft Works disappeared. I'd used that from its MS-DOS incarnation and only moved to Office because it was what the company turned to and what the people I saw as clients used. I think the vanishing of FrontPage was a similar loss.
The last time I saw BillG was the first time I saw you. It was on the stage at ODC2008, the Office Developer Conference in San Jose. Bill was making his farewell tour and you held a conversation with him on stage. There was a Sharepoint conference to follow and ODC attendees were puzzled and conflicted about that. I was mainly hanging out with the OOXML folk.
IMHO we did the right thing and had a focus. You can’t be everything to everyone (despite SteveB’s famous exhort, “Don’t give me OR….I WANT AND!”). That “solves” the problem until you realize that A AND B is usually not actually satisfying for either A or B. And some of the things we did for Office 2000 to satisfy IT requests (e.g. documenting all the previously obscure registry keys and adding Group Policy support) probably made the product more supportable in the future. I also remember from O2K “shipping is a feature” — being predictable for all the rest of the company functions that triggered on ship date also mattered.
> I still held out hope that we could find a path forward that was more appreciative to the individual sitting in front of Office with a job or schoolwork to do.
Looking back from now, I think Office 365 and now Microsoft 365 personal and home editions come close to that. And there are academic arrangements in many college settings. I'm uncertain about the move to on-line editions.
I notice many activities where the OOXML files are maintained as authoritative sources with PDF or some other form for publication and distribution.
There is a new kind of embrace for developers as well. Visual Studio is a substantial silo, yet the multi-platform support, the VS Code alternative, and even encouraging MingW and GNU compilers is a bit startling. And now, WSL and WSA. And GitHub.
The gap between Markdown's many flavors and Word as an authoritative authoring form is today's puzzle.
My first visit to Japan was around a collaboration between XSoft and Hitachi Information Systems concerning application of the DMA model in a Japanese initiative to pilot a document-management system for cultural preservation, likely sponsored in connection with MITI. Hide Hasagawa was the host; he'd been on assignment to RCA back when RCA was making mainframes. My counterpart was Mitsuru Akizawa, who'd earned an MS at Stanford. I would meet others in Japan who'd been on US assignments between Fuji Xerox and Xerox in Rochester. There were similar arrangements with Rank Xerox at the time.
I was amazed about the cordiality. I have remained friends with Hide and Mitsuru all this time. When I last traveled to Japan, as a consultant, I gave a presentation on document-management standards at Fuji Xerox Information Systems and my wife Vicki, on her only time in Japan, sat in. She'd never seen me at work before. The FXIS President took us to dinner later. HIde took us around the Tokyo area.
That trip was a kind of pilgrimage for Vicki, a potter. We went to Moshiko where there had been a revival of Japanese folk pottery after World War II. And Kyoto was amazing for her as well.
One thing I learned about the Japanese. The Japanese might hurry, but they are not rushed. There's a difference in the awareness and attention. It was very noticeable when we returned to a boarding area at Narita. Suddenly everything felt frantic and anxious.
I once got lost on the streets of Tokyo. I came up from the subway at the wrong corner and was completely disoriented. Passers-by must have noticed. A woman attempted to help me, and then a young man came up, understood what building I was looking for, and then walked me to it. I have paid that back on the Summer streets of Seattle a few times.
I also learned how my Palo Alto colleagues thought the Japanese were pushy. I explained it to Mitsuru once. It was about making requests and there was nothing wrong with how he did it.
Concerning Ballmer, the first time I saw him was from the audience at a Redmond campus studio event about features of Windows for the home. I think it was about Media Center. I'm uncertain whether Xbox was a thing yet.
My sense that Microsoft was not managing to also be a consumer company arrived when Microsoft Works disappeared. I'd used that from its MS-DOS incarnation and only moved to Office because it was what the company turned to and what the people I saw as clients used. I think the vanishing of FrontPage was a similar loss.
The last time I saw BillG was the first time I saw you. It was on the stage at ODC2008, the Office Developer Conference in San Jose. Bill was making his farewell tour and you held a conversation with him on stage. There was a Sharepoint conference to follow and ODC attendees were puzzled and conflicted about that. I was mainly hanging out with the OOXML folk.
IMHO we did the right thing and had a focus. You can’t be everything to everyone (despite SteveB’s famous exhort, “Don’t give me OR….I WANT AND!”). That “solves” the problem until you realize that A AND B is usually not actually satisfying for either A or B. And some of the things we did for Office 2000 to satisfy IT requests (e.g. documenting all the previously obscure registry keys and adding Group Policy support) probably made the product more supportable in the future. I also remember from O2K “shipping is a feature” — being predictable for all the rest of the company functions that triggered on ship date also mattered.
Yes totally. ORAPI was a *huge* win. The only thing that would have been better would have been to move all those settings to an INI file instead ;-)
Great Chapter.
> I still held out hope that we could find a path forward that was more appreciative to the individual sitting in front of Office with a job or schoolwork to do.
Looking back from now, I think Office 365 and now Microsoft 365 personal and home editions come close to that. And there are academic arrangements in many college settings. I'm uncertain about the move to on-line editions.
I notice many activities where the OOXML files are maintained as authoritative sources with PDF or some other form for publication and distribution.
There is a new kind of embrace for developers as well. Visual Studio is a substantial silo, yet the multi-platform support, the VS Code alternative, and even encouraging MingW and GNU compilers is a bit startling. And now, WSL and WSA. And GitHub.
The gap between Markdown's many flavors and Word as an authoritative authoring form is today's puzzle.