David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…We have to thank Brad Silverberg for helping us with this section. Brad led the Windows 3.1 team. He came in right after the 3.0 release and would eventually go on to lead the Windows 95 effort as the VP of the Personal Systems Division. Brad comes in, Windows 3.0 has just shipped. The first thing that is super, super obvious is as Brad observed everything going on with OS/2 land and everything going on with the core Microsoft culture, it was a complete clash. It was impossible for the pace of Microsoft. This is a super young group, all in their 20s. Some people in their 30s, but mostly 20s who just want to push the cutting edge, ship stuff. Think about Google in the early 2000s, just hire all the smartest people you can, set them loose, have creativity, and bump up against the edge of what's possible, both in terms of pushing the hardware, but also pushing even laws as we would later see. Let's just do what users love and see what happens. Let's just do what technology enables us to do and see what happens. That's the opposite of IBM's culture at this point. There's this huge cultural rift between what IBM needs and who Microsoft is at this point. What ended up happening with 3.0, it was unexpectedly loved. Microsoft was not really prepared for how much people were going to love the GUI, and with 3.1 it got really good. There was a small off site of the executives, and Bill and Steve basically decided that it was time to bet on Windows. That was the new strategy. Windows had always been plan B, and now suddenly it was plan A. When I say plan B, I don't mean thought they had a prayer of being plan A. It was 65 people that shipped windows 3.1. These were the misfits. It was not prestigious. The prestigious thing to work on at Microsoft was OS/2 and eventually Windows NT. But the Windows team in the Windows 3.0 era is almost the Mac team over at Apple. They were flying the rebel flag, they valued creativity over bureaucracy, even if it meant they weren't working on the prestigious thing. Suddenly, there's this huge strategic opportunity to become the standard independent of IBM if the platform is good enough, and then boom. The early reception to Windows is so good, it gives this glimmer of, that may seem really ambitious, but that opportunity is actually ours if we want to go seize it. Everyone took a big gulp and said, the GUI's the next big thing, users love this, let's take the ragtag group and promote them. This was, I think, the moment when Microsoft started to believe in themselves, really. If you look at the facts as we told the story, it was like, Bill did this great business deal with IBM, anticipated the rise of the clones in the first PC, won, and then Microsoft now was the thing, and IBM was the old thing. It wasn't until this. In this whole OS/2 thing, I think you can see, they felt like they were still little brother. They had to go along with what IBM dictated. Now they're like, whoa. Why do we again?…

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