David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I was, but it was such a different era in that 2012–2014 era. I guess 2011 is when I started as an intern. I'll have a lot of thoughts on it next episode. Okay, great. I've got one more playbook theme before we move on to power. Microsoft figured out software before anybody else, and they figured out so many aspects of what it means to be a software business before anybody else, but they figured out that software is never done. I do think a lot of their competitors, we didn't obviously didn't study Lotus to the same degree that we studied Microsoft here, we didn't study WordPerfect, et cetera, but I think there was a mindset that a lot of other folks are like, you ship software, and then the software was done. That was not the culture at Microsoft. This is related to what you were just saying. Shipping software is the beginning. You are always working on that software. You're working on next versions and stuff, but even before the next version, the work of software is never done. Of course, if you own the hardware, you definitely think of it more of like, well, we ship them, the big cabinet of things, we install it, and we fix it if it's broken, but we've sold them hardware. The software is required to run it, but the thing we sold them is the hardware. If you're a pure software company, you think about the world differently. You're like, well, I can always ship you another CD, another floppy disk, over the Internet. It's obviously very different. But because there weren't really software companies before them, of course people didn't come from that mindset.…

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