Sam Schillace: recommendation

Transcript context

…What I think of as you're describing this is, Microsoft Excel had a billion toolbars and buttons and options, which allowed Google Docs essentially to come in with a much simpler experience. Now you're on the other side of that, which is I didn't think about. Yeah, it's a really funny place to be. And it's funny to be at Microsoft, because I'm kind of the enemy, right? Because I'm the guy who messed them up a little bit. So there's some friction around that. Yeah, I mean I think there are similar trade-offs to be made right now, by the way, with AI. I think there's similar opportunities. But we made this choice with... So it's a little hard to remember, right? Because it's like 18 years, 17 years ago now, 18 years ago almost. In that era, Office was impregnable, right? So software had to be distributed physically, right, it had to be shipped around, it had to be bought and installed. It was harder to use. And so there's a very high transactional cost. Because there's a very high transactional cost, the buyers would always make this decision like, "Do I want the thing with 1,000 features or the thing with 995 features? I don't know what those last five are, but I might as well have all of them." And so that was just the lock-in for Microsoft, right? So we made this trade-off, we're like, "Look, we're easy to use, we're zero install, you don't have to ever deal with it, it's super convenient. Plus you get this one new feature that's really, really useful, which is collaborating with each other and not having to send attachments around the old file servers, but we're going to take away most of the features, because we don't care about them that much. " And we took away a little bit more than we should have. In the early days, we'd get all these complaints about people who wanted word count, which I thought was a really weird... I thought that was going to be way at the end of the list. We didn't have rulers, we didn't have any kind of formatting at that point, any real pagination. We just had these basic documents. But page word count came in, of course it was students, was one of our early adopters. So they really wanted to know if they were at the word count for the essay that they had just had assigned to them. So there was this dance with Microsoft that we deliberately made this trade-off. And I think it's almost like a classic innovator's dilemma model, right? We had this incumbent that was asymptotically approaching usefulness, they're adding stuff. Whenever they added stuff, it wasn't really that much more valuable. And then we were this small thing that came in into a market that they didn't care that much about, that they didn't understand that well, which is the internet stuff, this disruptive new thing. We just chipped away from the bottom, like the innovator's dilemma. And I think it was hard for Microsoft to respond to it. I think it took them a while to even have a clear idea of how they were going to respond to it. In retrospect, they did fine. We took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money basically. So we being Google. So they survived it. They did a good job surviving the challenge. We have all the users now, but they have all the money. We have all the money, I guess now. I want to spend more time on Google Docs and the story there. A couple questions. How long did it take from starting on it to feeling like it's working? Whatever you consider product market fit.…

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