“The Office 2003 Editions offer advances in intranet collaboration to help users gain access to and share information both internally and externally” —Microsoft’s Office 2003 Reviewer’s Guide [😴]
Fond memories of Heikki. He once taught me a phrase in Finnish, which of course turned out to mean something much different than what he told me it meant! and so many names on your tribute list, a few that i didn't know about. Sigh.
Apr 3, 2022·edited Apr 3, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky
So many memories, on the ground, Hailstorm added complexity as well, good idea, even ahead of its time, Office/Microsoft were in need of real service infrastructure, but ambition was ahead of clear execution plan/technology...
Heikki passing was such a shock, I was not close to him personally, but he was such an important leader and presence for the team and a great human being.
Heikki was a unique and wonderful person. Quite a loss when he died. He was always great to work with. Thanks for the tribute list Steven - some folks on there I had not realized had passed.
I still have many fond memories of Heikki. He told as my manager, "My job isn't to keep you here, it's to make it so that you don't want to leave." I've passed that quote on many times. I also remember him making team reservations at a restaurant, but they couldn't fit the entire team and he said, that's OK we can make that work, knowing full well that when we got there we would just pull up more chairs, and we did make it work. He found ways to make thing work and make his team better in the process.
Much to unpack there. I have already remarked that Office 2003 was a watershed version. I don't want to diminish the value of more-recent versions, including all that went into OOXML and use of OPC, and also the ribbon and other innovations that are more consumer-apparent.
I was bemused that OpenOffice seemed determined to compete (badly) with Office 2000 as if there was never anything new to worry about. That it was faux open-source under Sun/Oracle was also remarkable and the LibreOffice fork was perfectly understandable. Concerning all the energy wasted on ODF vs OOXML, and the magical thinking of ODF adherents about universality, it is rather revealing that the name was OpenOffice Document Format up until the final Committee Specification before adoption as an OASIS Standard. I am personally impressed by all the Microsoft effort to provide specifications that, save for court judgments, would not have been available. Some 'Softies I respect claim that it was a valuable exercise internally, as distracting as it was. Some of the dust-ups, such as how dates are handled in OOXML/Excel (and later in ODF) remind me of the big-/little-endian wars early in the development of WAN protocols.
You shed some interesting light on the FrontPage quandary. I can now see why that situation was considered toxic from a Microsoft perspective. On the other hand, I was very happy with the site-server model that relied on FrontPage, IIS Front Page Extensions, and Visual Source Safe for code control and a great way to not commit to public servers until the pages were confirmed.
I had a bCentral web site account and had to migrate when Microsoft did not persevere. I still have broken links on some pages where confusions around case sensitivity occurred when hosting on an Apache *nix-hosted service. I still have some of that lumbering along.
Likewise, I had a blog on Windows Live until those were abandoned with a migration service to WordPress. Fortunately, my blogs were authored using Windows Live Writer and I could republish locally-saved drafts to other blog hostings. That ecumenical nature maybe doomed Live Writer too, along with drifting of blog-hosting systems (such as Blogger) away from standard web-posting format schemes.
I will stop remarking on what it's like to be consumer cannon fodder in someone else's war, only to point out that my customer loyalty is not worth the cost of a postage stamp. I do wonder how well cross-platform tools of different kinds will endure as I continue to promote development of native applications and utilities for Windows at my nano-developer level :). I am not so unhappy that I will change course.
I do dread the day when Microsoft Money will no longer operate. I am less concerned about Media Player, as much as I favor it.
Fond memories of Heikki. He once taught me a phrase in Finnish, which of course turned out to mean something much different than what he told me it meant! and so many names on your tribute list, a few that i didn't know about. Sigh.
So many memories, on the ground, Hailstorm added complexity as well, good idea, even ahead of its time, Office/Microsoft were in need of real service infrastructure, but ambition was ahead of clear execution plan/technology...
Heikki passing was such a shock, I was not close to him personally, but he was such an important leader and presence for the team and a great human being.
Heikki was a unique and wonderful person. Quite a loss when he died. He was always great to work with. Thanks for the tribute list Steven - some folks on there I had not realized had passed.
I still have many fond memories of Heikki. He told as my manager, "My job isn't to keep you here, it's to make it so that you don't want to leave." I've passed that quote on many times. I also remember him making team reservations at a restaurant, but they couldn't fit the entire team and he said, that's OK we can make that work, knowing full well that when we got there we would just pull up more chairs, and we did make it work. He found ways to make thing work and make his team better in the process.
Much to unpack there. I have already remarked that Office 2003 was a watershed version. I don't want to diminish the value of more-recent versions, including all that went into OOXML and use of OPC, and also the ribbon and other innovations that are more consumer-apparent.
I was bemused that OpenOffice seemed determined to compete (badly) with Office 2000 as if there was never anything new to worry about. That it was faux open-source under Sun/Oracle was also remarkable and the LibreOffice fork was perfectly understandable. Concerning all the energy wasted on ODF vs OOXML, and the magical thinking of ODF adherents about universality, it is rather revealing that the name was OpenOffice Document Format up until the final Committee Specification before adoption as an OASIS Standard. I am personally impressed by all the Microsoft effort to provide specifications that, save for court judgments, would not have been available. Some 'Softies I respect claim that it was a valuable exercise internally, as distracting as it was. Some of the dust-ups, such as how dates are handled in OOXML/Excel (and later in ODF) remind me of the big-/little-endian wars early in the development of WAN protocols.
You shed some interesting light on the FrontPage quandary. I can now see why that situation was considered toxic from a Microsoft perspective. On the other hand, I was very happy with the site-server model that relied on FrontPage, IIS Front Page Extensions, and Visual Source Safe for code control and a great way to not commit to public servers until the pages were confirmed.
I had a bCentral web site account and had to migrate when Microsoft did not persevere. I still have broken links on some pages where confusions around case sensitivity occurred when hosting on an Apache *nix-hosted service. I still have some of that lumbering along.
Likewise, I had a blog on Windows Live until those were abandoned with a migration service to WordPress. Fortunately, my blogs were authored using Windows Live Writer and I could republish locally-saved drafts to other blog hostings. That ecumenical nature maybe doomed Live Writer too, along with drifting of blog-hosting systems (such as Blogger) away from standard web-posting format schemes.
I will stop remarking on what it's like to be consumer cannon fodder in someone else's war, only to point out that my customer loyalty is not worth the cost of a postage stamp. I do wonder how well cross-platform tools of different kinds will endure as I continue to promote development of native applications and utilities for Windows at my nano-developer level :). I am not so unhappy that I will change course.
I do dread the day when Microsoft Money will no longer operate. I am less concerned about Media Player, as much as I favor it.