Safe Journeys, Bill

Well, Bill Gates is officially passing the baton.  He is definitely the Edison or Ford of our generation.   In a hundred years the odd thing is that he may be best known not for the computer systems his company enabled or the massive spread of computer usage he foresaw but quite possibly the efforts that his foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will go through to reduce disease and improve life for everyone on the planet. 

Having started at Microsoft in 1998 it was an interesting time(Hello, Confucious?) – Bill was still firmly in charge – and the DOJ was just beginning their attack on Microsoft.  A memo from Bill could turn 25,000 employees on a dime and the energy at the company was palpable.  Everyone felt like they were changing the world every day.   People were still running around the company talking about grand ideas and how everything they were doing was going to be the next great thing.  I started in the Premier Support group and Kevin Johnson was then just beginning a stellar rise to the top of Microsoft.  He was the Director of Premier Support.  Steve Ballmer was still the head of the sales organization and everyone thought ‘The Lawsuit’ would get put to bed quickly.  That first year was probably the last year of the ‘up and coming’ organization feeling inside of Microsoft.  We were still adding market value, the stock options on paper looked like they would be awesome and the software was looking good – Windows 98 was on the horizon and everything was looking up.

Then reality slowly started to set in – the DOJ wasn’t going away.  New products had fairly mediocre receptions and there was nothing that was getting to market that was earth shattering.  In 2000 Bill handed the reins over to Ballmer and started stepping back from the company operations – people inside the company probably felt the change to Ballmer MUCH more than people outside realized.  The company certainly continued growing – 60,000 employees when I left -  new product ideas like Xbox were getting to market, but that feeling of changing the world went away.  We were locked up and monitored.  The energy and enthusiasm was slowly draining away and the stock price certainly stagnated.  My managers essentially started telling us to become role players, not entrepreneurs.  That immediately took away the feeling of having control and ownership and so this past January I decided it was time to head out and go find a new company with entrepreneurial spirit – a startup, in fact.

Bill’s energy and spirit have slowly faded from the company he founded and so it is not surprising he is picking this time to go.  The company is still moving forward and I think they will once again become a driving force, but those early days that lasted up until the late ’90s will probably not been seen there again.  I and the others who were there were fortunate to have seen those days.  1998 was one of the best years of my professional life and I learned so much about business in those days that I couldn’t even put a value on that time.  There were never a group of people better at creating something with little resources as there were at Microsoft in those days.  

I was honored to have met Bill a couple of times at Microsoft annual events and his presence will certainly be missed.  He is sticking to his word and honoring the commitment of devoting time and money to philanthropy for good causes.  It’s an honor to have worked at Microsoft in some of the years he was still actively involved and the world is lucky to have him focused on the causes that will drive him in this next phase of his life.

Safe Journeys, Bill.  I can’t wait to see what you come up with next. 

Microsoft Time

So, while I’m up early watching the boy, I thought I would share a funny story from my early days at Microsoft.

They have a lot of internal catch phrases and sayiings – like ‘drinking from the firehose’, ’sell the app, secure the stack’, and ‘the meeting will happen on Microsoft time’.

I learned early on that ‘Microsoft Time’ could mean a lot of things – meetings start late, customer activity took such precedence that internal meetings (even mandatory ones) were an afterthought sometimes. I even saw a note sent out by a program manager once advertising the baked goods and drinks he would have at a meeting to entice people to show up. It worked.

Another interesting thing about Microsoft Time was that so many smart and dedicated people work there they can often do things in half the time you might expect – I once saw a ‘buddy fix’ created by a software engineer during the time they were flying to a customer site – from start to finish, the code was modified, reviewed and delivered all in about 3 hours – not something you should try at home, but this was a mission critical app that needed to be fixed YESTERDAY.

This has changed much over the years – internal meetings that are mandatory are now looked at more seriously and fixes and technical publications take longer for legal review and technical review, I think sometimes that the reviews and internal focus has fundamentally changed the way the company deals with customers in such a way that they are just evolving to the next IBM, but we’ll see. There are still a lot of smart, energetic people there trying to change the world.