Brief Insight Into Why Microsoft Lost It's Way

Tandy Trower has an article published on Technologizer about his involvement as Product Manager for Microsoft Windows 1.0. In it, he recounts the story of how he became involved with Windows, what Microsoft was like in the "early" days and how Windows came to be.

At the time, Mr. Trower's boss was then head of Microsoft's product marketing group, Steve Ballmer. Balmer had already fired 4 previous head's of the Windows project when Trower took over.

Windows was late. The press was starting to think of it as vaporware. It was doubtful the product would ever ship. Ballmer gave Trower 6 months to finish Windows and ship it.

Trower's background was in consumer products and he was tasked with finishing, shipping and marketing an "application interface" for which there were no applications. Moreover, design decisions had been made that rendered the product "a bit clunky" - fixed width typeface instead of proportional one, non-overlapping windows. In Trower's opinion it was ugly, and not at all appealing to users.

Here's the insight into Microsoft's core personality:

There wasn't much time to make changes. Ballmer was emphatic not to redefine what was already done....Steve's promise was that in the next release [Trower] would get creative freedom to make significant changes...The product needed to be finished, not further tweaked in any way that jeopardized getting it out that summer without further embarrassment.

In other words, Ballmer would rather ship a mediocre product to appease the media than ship a product the users would love.

Now, that guy runs the company.

Take a peek at the article at Technologizer.