WinXP was the first OS with Watson. As such, a lot of low-lying fruit was there to be picked; many bugs (in Windows itself) got reported and fixed. But alas, the fixes were being held up, because Win management really really wanted to simul-ship the Windows XP Service Pack with Windows Server. Lots of good reasons for this, but there's a limit!
Watson has a feature where we can tag buckets with a link; if you hit Send on that bucket, we bring up the browser, typically saying "we fixed this, go <here> for the update". But since the SP hadn't shipped, the page (for a zillion buckets) was authored to say (in effect) "hey we've fixed this bug, really we have, and you'll get the fix really soon, but not just yet". Needless to say, this made not a lick of sense to our customers.
Win XP probably ran on 1000x as many machines as Server. No one was clamoring for the Server release, but all my XP peeps were being denied their fixes, and it just kept dragging on. So I wrote to whatever Windows Veep ran the thing, and told him to get off the pot, sever the connection, ditch the simship, deliver my SP. To his credit, they did so, and I was happy.
And then, twenty years later at a party, somehow the subject came up, and some guy I'd never met before said "that was you?", and was ready to punch me out over it. I guess he'd been square in the simship clan, and I'd shoved him aside.
I should definitely mention. Watson in the context of the SP as that was huge and a lot of work from the Office team. I sent a bunch of emails to bill over the course of the release sharing the way Watson was improving XP. Yay!
The religion around the service packs was so real. And swinging to the other extreme in the midst of Longhorn led to a huge shift we'll see later where Windows just outsourced all of servicing to vendors in India, creating a huge loss of knowledge and speed in process. They went the exact opposite we did in Office which was a small servicing team developing the expertise on dealing with customers, reproducing bugs, and isolating the best way to address the issue along with a "you broke it you fix it" mentality on the product side.
It may be that when I asked, you yourself felt that customer obsession and competition were both important to the company. Still, I can't help but treat the paragraph that enumerates the long list of vanquished competitors as the driver of cultural "swagger" and market cap as Exhibit A of a faulty focus on competitors over customers. I found myself wishing for additional praise which would also have been truthful, for all the great products, as well as a description of the explosion of happy Microsoft customers, which I saw as an executive for a leading ISV during this same period.
This was the period where Autodesks's customers and employees thanked us (and my company rewarded me personally) for becoming Microsoft-centric rather than yelling at me for "submitting to the 'borg'", removing OS choice, etc. as they had complained in the 90s.
This focus on competitors over customers was the only weak area of Microsoft, to me. Every company has one. I always saw room for both and wished MSFT could have talked about customer love more than competitor bashing. I also often wondered if the optics of this lopsided emphasis weren't a driver for the legal problems, which I always saw as fabricated by weak competitors (and I have a few examples of competitive leadership behavior that prove it).
Separately, are you going to edit all this and kill some trees some day?
Well I must be on to something since I've gotten feedback that I was too cheerful and positive :-)
What I am intentionally trying to do, for better or worse is for others to judge, is capture how it felt for me. There was a huge rise up to Office 2000 in terms of feeling like we were really making folks happy. It was one reason I think of this as the beginning of the PC revolution (the end of the beginning being Office 97). The middle is much less euphoric as the enterprise business took on the characteristics of Microsoft writ large--it was always critical always wanting more sooner and always seeing the problems in the strategy (holes, inconsistencies). The pain and struggle to upgrade so many desktops was real and the feedback about that was real.
The happiness was real. The customer satisfaction was real. But that was with users. The buyers, in an enterprise sense, grew increasingly frustrated. They were seeking alternatives to every part of the stack--Java, HTML, Network computer, Start Office, Linux, Netscape. The consideration of these was partially just a price negotiation but there were real frustrations.
That doesn't mean the end users weren't happy--the strategy of focusing on enterprises front loaded the misery to IT and they were vocal, permanently focused on Microsoft, and impacted how we felt.
In this middle era I am trying to capture that. It dominated all of our discussions.
Now that you describe it this way, as a B2B software company, we at Autodesk experienced pretty much the same dynamic. So it makes resonates with my own experience there
The Windows Scalability slide brings back a lot of memories. :-)
WinXP was the first OS with Watson. As such, a lot of low-lying fruit was there to be picked; many bugs (in Windows itself) got reported and fixed. But alas, the fixes were being held up, because Win management really really wanted to simul-ship the Windows XP Service Pack with Windows Server. Lots of good reasons for this, but there's a limit!
Watson has a feature where we can tag buckets with a link; if you hit Send on that bucket, we bring up the browser, typically saying "we fixed this, go <here> for the update". But since the SP hadn't shipped, the page (for a zillion buckets) was authored to say (in effect) "hey we've fixed this bug, really we have, and you'll get the fix really soon, but not just yet". Needless to say, this made not a lick of sense to our customers.
Win XP probably ran on 1000x as many machines as Server. No one was clamoring for the Server release, but all my XP peeps were being denied their fixes, and it just kept dragging on. So I wrote to whatever Windows Veep ran the thing, and told him to get off the pot, sever the connection, ditch the simship, deliver my SP. To his credit, they did so, and I was happy.
And then, twenty years later at a party, somehow the subject came up, and some guy I'd never met before said "that was you?", and was ready to punch me out over it. I guess he'd been square in the simship clan, and I'd shoved him aside.
I should definitely mention. Watson in the context of the SP as that was huge and a lot of work from the Office team. I sent a bunch of emails to bill over the course of the release sharing the way Watson was improving XP. Yay!
The religion around the service packs was so real. And swinging to the other extreme in the midst of Longhorn led to a huge shift we'll see later where Windows just outsourced all of servicing to vendors in India, creating a huge loss of knowledge and speed in process. They went the exact opposite we did in Office which was a small servicing team developing the expertise on dealing with customers, reproducing bugs, and isolating the best way to address the issue along with a "you broke it you fix it" mentality on the product side.
It may be that when I asked, you yourself felt that customer obsession and competition were both important to the company. Still, I can't help but treat the paragraph that enumerates the long list of vanquished competitors as the driver of cultural "swagger" and market cap as Exhibit A of a faulty focus on competitors over customers. I found myself wishing for additional praise which would also have been truthful, for all the great products, as well as a description of the explosion of happy Microsoft customers, which I saw as an executive for a leading ISV during this same period.
This was the period where Autodesks's customers and employees thanked us (and my company rewarded me personally) for becoming Microsoft-centric rather than yelling at me for "submitting to the 'borg'", removing OS choice, etc. as they had complained in the 90s.
This focus on competitors over customers was the only weak area of Microsoft, to me. Every company has one. I always saw room for both and wished MSFT could have talked about customer love more than competitor bashing. I also often wondered if the optics of this lopsided emphasis weren't a driver for the legal problems, which I always saw as fabricated by weak competitors (and I have a few examples of competitive leadership behavior that prove it).
Separately, are you going to edit all this and kill some trees some day?
Well I must be on to something since I've gotten feedback that I was too cheerful and positive :-)
What I am intentionally trying to do, for better or worse is for others to judge, is capture how it felt for me. There was a huge rise up to Office 2000 in terms of feeling like we were really making folks happy. It was one reason I think of this as the beginning of the PC revolution (the end of the beginning being Office 97). The middle is much less euphoric as the enterprise business took on the characteristics of Microsoft writ large--it was always critical always wanting more sooner and always seeing the problems in the strategy (holes, inconsistencies). The pain and struggle to upgrade so many desktops was real and the feedback about that was real.
The happiness was real. The customer satisfaction was real. But that was with users. The buyers, in an enterprise sense, grew increasingly frustrated. They were seeking alternatives to every part of the stack--Java, HTML, Network computer, Start Office, Linux, Netscape. The consideration of these was partially just a price negotiation but there were real frustrations.
That doesn't mean the end users weren't happy--the strategy of focusing on enterprises front loaded the misery to IT and they were vocal, permanently focused on Microsoft, and impacted how we felt.
In this middle era I am trying to capture that. It dominated all of our discussions.
Now that you describe it this way, as a B2B software company, we at Autodesk experienced pretty much the same dynamic. So it makes resonates with my own experience there