As we conclude the story of Office12 and the major redesign of the product, Microsoft of late 2005 to early 2006 is in a bit of a lull which for better or worse is good for the launch of Office. Longhorn continues to stretch out and the lack of clarity continues, which is putting a drag on everyone. There’s something very special, yet bittersweet, about this release of Office.

With the conclusion of this chapter, Hardcore Software, will start to get into Windows. I have about 30 stories planned. As my roles have changed so too have the stories. With Windows, we will see a lot more detail on organization, change management, strategy, and direct competition. If you are not a subscriber, please consider signing up. Audio will continue to be free and posts with all the graphics, artifacts, PDFs, and videos will be available to subscribers.

Back to 081. First Feedback and a Surprise

IMPORTANT: The audio for this edition can be found here. This is the first week where audio generate a second email. Feedback welcome via email or twitter.

Nearly every country’s “Feedback to Corp” slide at the grueling field sales multiweek Mid-Year Reviews (MYRs) in January 2006 published the same bullet point:

🚩 Office “12” – Needs Classic Mode

What was this big, and clearly coordinated push for something called classic mode, and why now? We, of course, knew what it was but we did not know why this was happening now. It was very late in the schedule, post-beta testing. We were just months from scheduled completion as we just went through the final validation of the product—when the team is changing as few things as possible for the last few months, certainly not making any design changes.

A broad public beta went out to most enterprise customers as well as the technical press. More people enrolled in the beta than we expected or could even imagine. There was a great deal of interest in such a bold direction for Office.

As with the technical beta, the reactions came swiftly and clearly, often based on little more than the first few minutes with the product. Reactions from the press arrived in three waves—straightforward news of the release, first looks or reactions based on first experiences, and then, after a week or so, deeper dives into the product.

The first looks wrote themselves as we expected. Office12 was a sweeping change, and the obvious commentary or controversy questioned whether customers or the market were ready for it. Would it work? How difficult would it be to learn? Almost always the point of view of why the change was made was reflected, but the tone was skeptical. That was kind of annoying, but entirely expected.

For example, CNET’s Ina Fried who is always fair and balanced, said, “The radical revamp could help the company as it seeks to stave off competition from OpenOffice and others, but it also risks alienating those who like things the way they are.”1

Computer Reseller News, the trade publication focused on small and medium business, went to great lengths to express concern. “While most users will welcome the additional features, Microsoft’s decision to teach its customers a new user interface for accessing commands and functions could be a risky proposition. Once the beta testers (and the bloggers) have registered their opinions, some Office 12 design points could be in for a course correction.”2

A more detailed expression of concern came from CNET’s editors. “In the past, Microsoft has sabotaged itself by unrolling too many new features to Office too fast. We’re keeping a lookout for problems; after all, Office 12 was in its storyboard stages just a few months ago. If you’ve spent the past two years mastering Office 2003, prepare for a steep learning curve.”3

These articles generated the MYR feedback. The enterprise account managers, essentially all our revenue except for Japan, were on the verge of freaking out. They saw the Ribbon as pure friction in the way of revenue and nothing less. They cited doubts expressed in the articles, reprinted in every language around the world, as evidence of deep concerns over the direction Office was taking. They did not want to spend energy selling Office where the assumption was we’d already won. They wanted to focus on selling the big server strategy, where we were losing to open source Linux and a host of smaller competitors. So why put up a barrier, they asked.

As if to highlight these enterprise customer concerns even more, in the spring of 2005 Office marketing rolled out worldwide a series of advertisements as a follow-on to the “Great Moments” campaign previously described. Attempting to inject humor into the extremely enterprise Office 2003 wave and to encourage customers to digitally enable knowledge workers, marketing developed a new advertising campaign affectionately called “Dinosaurs” though formally called “Evolve.” These ads featured humans in the office but with oversized, cartoonish dinosaur heads, implying those who have not yet embraced a digital workstyle including running Office 2003 were dinosaurs. In other words, we called nearly all our customers dinosaurs. At least the ads were popular in Japan, a market known to appreciate a good mascot, where the company distributed a large quantity of small plastic dinosaur heads.