David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…The thing they were realizing is, well, we have made software that people like to use, so they're using it in businesses. They always wanted that to be the goal, but now it was happening. People are doing their work in Excel. People are bringing PCs to the office. Maybe businesses are buying their PCs, but people are actually buying them themselves and using them in the office. It just made them that much more efficient. Microsoft really had to figure out how to sell to businesses, but we actually have no idea how to do that. It sounds crazy today. The Microsoft you know today, as late as the mid-90s, really had no idea how to sell or build software for businesses. Totally. This is the first half of the original Microsoft vision statement coming true, a PC on every desk and in every home. Desk means work, means enterprise. In this era, everybody we talk to, gives 100% of the credit to Steve Ballmer. Steve took it on his shoulders at this point in time when Microsoft is passing IBM to say, I am going to build, and we are going to learn as a company how to sell to enterprises. Ben, like you're saying, it's impossible to imagine now Microsoft not like this, but there's so much that they needed to do that they didn't have. In part because prior to this, personal computers were not used by enterprises. It was just not an enterprise tool. Now that it was happening, Microsoft had to figure out how to be the ones that would benefit from it.…

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