Remembering Mike Maples, Sr.

The computer industry lost a legendary executive this week with the passing of Mike Maples, Sr.

The computer industry lost a legendary executive this week with the passing of Mike Maples, Sr. He was a mentor, leader, and role model to a generation of Microsoft employees, including me. By any account, Mike created the product culture that was critical to scaling and executing what became the modern Microsoft admired by so many.

Mike joined Microsoft in 1988. He was an unexpected hire to many, as he came from IBM. He was hired at the most senior level in the company, back when the company had few executives and had not done particularly well at outside hires. Microsoft had a strong business partnership but challenging joint development program with IBM during which the combination was building the OS/2 operating system. As a joint project it was culturally difficult to say the least. He was hired to run the Applications Division, Apps, which at the time was primarily seeing success on Macintosh representing almost half of Microsoft revenue and profit. Microsoft’s first-party applications were distant number 3 or worse. At the time, Windows was mostly an idea, that took forever to ship. Still, the Apps strategy was confused between DOS, Windows, OS/2, and Macintosh. The team was not particularly organized for success as a combination of product units and job functions.

Through a series of organizational changes as well as some key acquisitions like Forethought/PowerPoint, Mike led the transformation of Apps into an execution machine. What was incredible about how Mike led was that these results were achieved by incredibly difficult work—pioneering work—by many people doing amazing things with little chaos or randomness as we used to say. All along, Mike created a culture of respect, collaboration, and most of all “promise and deliver”. He instilled in everyone the most basic notion of saying what you’re going to do and doing that well. It was during these early and formative days of the Apps business that Mike coached the team to learn and improve from mistakes, such as the famous “Zero Defects” memo on quality. With a history of all of Microsoft’s products spinning out of control and shipping years later than promised, internally and externally, Excel 3.0 shipped a mere 11 days later than its originally planned date, an unheard-of accomplishment. It wasn’t simply Mike’s direct efforts. There were amazing people assembled on the product team and leading the Excel product unit, Mike’s creation. It was Mike's cultural leadership, his touchstone. Mike challenged the team and coached them. The team delivered. And Apps as more than an org, but a culture, was born. Mike was Apps.

If you visited the Microsoft campus you would have noticed in the Apps courtyard special bronzed tiles with the names of products and the dates they shipped. This was part of a culture Mike created, the Ship It awards. Everyone received a weighty acrylic block commemorating the accomplishment of shipping in an era when that was nearly impossible. After each product shipped, a tile was added to the courtyard and we each got a mini tile to affix to our personal Ship It Award. Mike instilled the idea of shipping across the company.

Some very smart people in marketing had an idea for delivering both individually successful apps of Word and Excel to customers that seemed to be buying only one of the Apps. An earlier idea for DOS Apps did not do well in market but the seed was planted. The early results from Macintosh Office were so successful it was clear there would be a pivot to a suite of products and not just one. Mike wrote a key memo outlining both the customer strategy and the competitive advantage that came from a focus on the newly birthed Office product. It became something of a stump speech he delivered. In the technically and technology-driven Microsoft culture, Mike was among the first to bring customer and market strategy to the forefront.

At the same time, Windows 3.0 was close to completion and was looking like it would be an excellent product. Windows Office 1.0 shipped just months after Windows 3.0. What Mike did was lead us to strategic clarity. I was just a developer in what would become C++ trying to figure out who we were building tools for—Windows, Mac, OS/2, DOS, NT—we just had no idea. I vividly remember the day Mike brought us all clarity. Windows was our focus, though Macintosh remained “sim ship” for quite some time. While Bill Gates had written clearly that “Windows was a platform for the 90s” he also thought doing cross-platform wasn’t difficult :-) Mike was an incredibly important force in balancing all we needed to do at the time. Again, promise and deliver.

On my C++ team, which reported to Mike, we were so struggling with focusing on Windows that we had to do a “review” meeting with him. Now Microsoft review meetings at the time were of two totally different types. There were the Systems meetings (Windows, DOS, OS/2, and then NT) which were like the BillG reviews that had become infamous. Apps meetings were much more structured and much less "in the weeds”. We prepared a deck that probably had 50 slides in it, which we could never cover but would have been typical at the time. We went through a bunch of slides. We were running out of time and jumped to the end with a slide that raised the question “Should we do a Windows hosted toolset for building Windows or stick to command line”. We were torn and debating but we knew Windows was the strategy but so was everything else we thought.

Mike looked at us, rings of people encircling the big table. He asked, “How long have y'all been thinking about this problem?” Of course it had been months, day and night, but mostly we just froze. He then said in his best Oklahoma accent “There’s a lot here…much more than I can absorb in an hour. How long have y’all been working on these foils and this problem?” More silence.

Mike then followed up, “Y’all been working on this longer than me, and know more than I will ever know. Why don’t you just tell me what you decided to do and then we can move the project forward?” That wasn't how Microsoft worked, the more senior a person was the more certain they were and did not hesitate to tell you that. He was teaching us how that doesn't really scale.

We continued to debate in front of Mike, the two sides of the C++ team. The big issue was a Windows product might take longer and appeal to fewer customers which meant losing competitively perhaps. Mike looked at us and told us to tell him when we could ship and why that would be a competitive win, and then just ship that when we said. That’s what we did. Probably the most important meeting of my career.

With Office doing well, Mike took the next step which was to build an organization that represented the product that needed to be built and that customers were buying. Mike had created the organization that got us to this point. In what you don’t see all that often, he then put the right people in place to create a new kind of organization, one structured to build and deliver Office. He did so by undoing some of the things he did. He did so with such grace and clarity that it became a model that I and others would follow through many more generations of Office and then a few generations of Windows.

That change was in a sense a passing of the torch to those that Mike had mentored and managed through his original Apps organization to this new organization (this is also when I joined Office). Mike became one of the three most senior executives in the company with Bill and Steve, leading the entirety of Microsoft product development. In this immense role he was the executive leading Windows and Office and everything from tools to games to enterprise servers. Everyone came to benefit from Mike’s leadership and cultural transformation.

Mike retired to his beloved ranch in the summer of 1995. Of course he didn’t quite retire. He served as an advisor, investor, board director, educator, and more to companies of all kinds. I had an incredible opportunity to teach a class at Stanford with him in 2016 when he made a trip out. I was overcome with emotion when the first slide went up — my name next to Mike’s on a slide.

I wanted to remember Mike’s professional life but his life outside of work was everything to him and a source of support and inspiration. Mike’s wife Carolyn was ever-present at Microsoft events always remembering each of us and survives him in Texas. Mike’s son, Mike Jr. is himself a legendary investor and founder of Floodgate in Palo Alto, and he is also an author of the recently published Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future.

I owe everything in my professional life to Mike, most literally everything.

Many have so much to be thankful for the contributions Mike made to the computer industry.

May Mike’s memory be a blessing.

Tren Griffin, long-time Microsoft employee, wrote an essay “A Dozen Things I’ve Learned From Mike Maples Sr. About Business and Investing” which also references a wonderfully detailed interview with Bob Gaskins, founder of Forethought/PowerPoint, should you wish to read more about the impact Mike had during his time at Microsoft and after.