David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…I literally worked on this. My internship was at Microsoft and I worked on adding headers and footers to the Microsoft Word web app. We were porting the Windows code to have perfect document fidelity to the web, so when you looked on the web and then print it from the web, the document would be laid out, pixel for pixel, character for character, exactly how it would look on the printed page. When you have that requirement, that is a hard, hard engineering task. It’s still not as good as Google Docs. I love it that this launched your technology career. Amazing. But yeah, from Google’s perspective, this is amazing. Microsoft is now forced to bring their crown jewels to the web, which they don’t want to do. Ben, to your point, because they have to make it look and feel and function exactly like the installed desktop apps, this is going to take them a long time and be a big investment. Fantastic. And no matter what, it’s going to be more complicated because with Google, since it’s all free, there’s no licensing. Someone just shares a Google Doc with you. If you have permission to view it, you view it. With Microsoft, I remember at first it was antithetical. It was like, but what if I haven’t bought Word? Can I just use Word for free in the web then? Is Microsoft okay with that? Am I going to hit some weird usage tier? It’s confusing for users. It forces the company to think about pricing and packaging. It was a master stroke by Google.…

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