"‘Brian [MacDonald] would like to roll out NetDocs aggressively'...But MacDonald is meeting resistance from Steven Sinofsky.” –BusinessWeek Online, Oct. 30, 2000
"It would be like trying to use Word’s code for footnotes in PowerPoint, without dragging along all of the Word code." -- it is great that web3 fixes this with its focus on composability.
I should have added that this was not a fictional comment, but one I often used with Bill when talking about sharing code. He always would quickly snap back “yes we should do that and it is because Word has no architecture that we can’t”. This first came up in a review of Publisher 2.0 when they were doing a huge amount of work to add bullets and numbering.
Great article and very enlightening to the backstory of NetDocks! Minor (yes minor) typo to the caption for the year on the Brian Macdonald email, the email image itself says 2001, but your photo caption incorrectly says 2018.
"Mail BrianMac sent to the NetDocs team (Subscription Services Division All) in April **2018**, about a month before the vision presentation to the Office.NET team."
I believe the caption should be:
"Mail BrianMac sent to the NetDocs team (Subscription Services Division All) in April **2001**, about a month before the vision presentation to the Office.NET team."
Correcting a mistake I made. I got a little ahead of myself in staffing. Don Gagne (DonGa) was the original GM of XDocs when it moved to Office, with Rajesh Jha (RajeshJ) leading program management. I fixed this and the error becomes more material in "075. Transitions" when we made a change mid-cycle. The text was changed in the post to reflect this.
This entry is fascinating to read. As someone who was in Outlook for a good number of years, my colleagues and I watched with horror as BrianMac literally hired half the Outlook team over two years and seemed to be rebuilding Outlook and Office to compete with Outlook.
One thing you didn’t outright mention (probably due to your kindness) is that NetDocs was a PIG. It consumed enormous resources, barely could boot and was terrible. Our NetDocs (ex Outlook friends) invited us over for a demo and after I saw it, I pretty much knew they were doomed. NetDocs seemed to be pure mythical man month fodder. Hundreds of people and a product that barely booted.
I can tell you that we on the Outlook team we’re praying that you/Office/JeffR shutdown and merged NetDocs because it seemed like an enormous waste of resources. When the Outlook team heard the news of NetDocs coming to Office, there were cheers in the hallway. On our end, it felt like Steven and Office had finally ended the insanity.
"It would be like trying to use Word’s code for footnotes in PowerPoint, without dragging along all of the Word code." -- it is great that web3 fixes this with its focus on composability.
Putting aside the web3 comment :-)
I should have added that this was not a fictional comment, but one I often used with Bill when talking about sharing code. He always would quickly snap back “yes we should do that and it is because Word has no architecture that we can’t”. This first came up in a review of Publisher 2.0 when they were doing a huge amount of work to add bullets and numbering.
Great article and very enlightening to the backstory of NetDocks! Minor (yes minor) typo to the caption for the year on the Brian Macdonald email, the email image itself says 2001, but your photo caption incorrectly says 2018.
"Mail BrianMac sent to the NetDocs team (Subscription Services Division All) in April **2018**, about a month before the vision presentation to the Office.NET team."
I believe the caption should be:
"Mail BrianMac sent to the NetDocs team (Subscription Services Division All) in April **2001**, about a month before the vision presentation to the Office.NET team."
Thank you for the kind words. And yes I got that wrong in the caption.
Correcting a mistake I made. I got a little ahead of myself in staffing. Don Gagne (DonGa) was the original GM of XDocs when it moved to Office, with Rajesh Jha (RajeshJ) leading program management. I fixed this and the error becomes more material in "075. Transitions" when we made a change mid-cycle. The text was changed in the post to reflect this.
This entry is fascinating to read. As someone who was in Outlook for a good number of years, my colleagues and I watched with horror as BrianMac literally hired half the Outlook team over two years and seemed to be rebuilding Outlook and Office to compete with Outlook.
One thing you didn’t outright mention (probably due to your kindness) is that NetDocs was a PIG. It consumed enormous resources, barely could boot and was terrible. Our NetDocs (ex Outlook friends) invited us over for a demo and after I saw it, I pretty much knew they were doomed. NetDocs seemed to be pure mythical man month fodder. Hundreds of people and a product that barely booted.
I can tell you that we on the Outlook team we’re praying that you/Office/JeffR shutdown and merged NetDocs because it seemed like an enormous waste of resources. When the Outlook team heard the news of NetDocs coming to Office, there were cheers in the hallway. On our end, it felt like Steven and Office had finally ended the insanity.