With the excitement over the "Friends" reunion, I wanted to share this video, "The Windows 95 Video Guide" which was released with Windows 95 in August 1995. It aged just about as well as Friends. 1/
Windows 95 Video Guide (1995)
2/ If you're curious about just how much "crap" people went through to use a computer 25 years ago then this is a wonderful time capsule.
There's a section on 20 FAQs and each one is a tech support nightmare. Also, constant reminders about tech support in general.
Example:
3/ There are other fantastic questions such as "Can Windows 95 run Macintosh software" tl;dr, NO.
4/ And because shipping the org chart is even something we do with third party videos, at minute 55:30 there is a tacked on bit of stock footage to point out that you can also get Office [for] Windows 95 (not Office 95).
5/ But really this was all about the Friends reunion. So here's the VHS box and full cover art. Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry go on a quirky caper *from Bill Gates' office* that involves meeting up with their friend in a "Grunge band". Kids, the 90's were super cool.
6/ Please subscribe to …rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com. Stories from the PC revolution. I'm about to change jobs and start working on Office 95. Will be great fun.
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In Peter Drucker's 1954 classic "The Practice of Management" he described the role of the CEO as being a combination of the right level of outside, inside, and action focus arrived at through management by objectives. 1/
In a later work this is refined (American CEO series in WSJ) he described the importance of an outside role and then a bridge to inside. 2/ wsj.com/articles/SB110…
This is a great framework but the problem is finding all of these in one person can be daunting or impossible resulting in disappointment/failure.
Also holds not just for CEO but for any sort of divisional or business leadership role (eg in charge of a whole biz). 3/
The list of things people repeat as if they are evil or some secret plan continues to surprise me: “ads”, private label, loss leaders, loyalty cards/benefits, price incentives…Amazon generational innovation is in distribution and efficiency, like every mass market retailer ever.
Telling the Untold Story in "Hardcore Software" (inside the rise and fall of the PC revolution) tells the story of Microsoft's famous pivot to the Internet. Writing on @substack draws out fun stories from a community of readers adding even more. Example: …rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/029-telling-…
2/ Shared the behind the scenes details of a cover story in July '96 BusinessWeek magazine giving a timeline of events leading to Microsoft's big bet on open internet technologies (aka "embrace and extend"). Story opened with this quote from the employee newsletter, _MicroNews_.
3/ I got a note from former Microsoftie Dean Ballard, former developer on the TrueType team (and among other things named Trebuchet typeface). Turns out DeanBal authored "Battle Hymn" which he documents here including a fun series of MicroNews letters. deanbal.net/hymn/hymn.htm
Narratives are a powerful concept that make difficult concepts easy (and even fun, interesting) for us to understand. BUT they also come with some rish—risk from abstracting out important details and context that might diverge from facts. This happens quite a bit… 1/
2/ I want to talk about this in context of business because there's a lot going on where compelling narratives are taking hold, which sound like big problems or a lesson from business history but might hold us back collectively from finding solutions or understnading challenges.
3/ This is not a new problem and to be clear it isn't one to ascribe to malice. In fact it is most always a simple form of confirmation bias or "that just makes sense" combined with a bit of "if that's true it fits super well with a broader narrative." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmat…
What did a corporate network look like in 1994? Here are some slides I made in the summer of 1994 for the interns. MS had 35,000 PCs sending 12.2 million email messages a month. Also, MS had 23 mini computers and a mainframe with 3.2 terabytes of disk space. 1/
2/ Why is this so interesting? Because companies around the world were building out networks like this right when the Internet arrived. The Internet upended how to think about connectivity. A BigCo connected to the internet versus making its own Intranet.
3/ Many of us were incredibly excited by the opportunity the Internet brought us. Sitting in a hallway outside a the TCP/IP Dev Manager's office was Microsoft's FTP server. No demand gen. Spontaneous usage!
2/ The phrase "disruption" wasn't even around in 1994. In fact the original paper was months away before the language it created came to define the internet. (not yet "Innovator's Dilemma")
3/ When we first saw breadth of internet technologies all at once, it was still easy to dismiss for the reasons one can imagine. They didn't work as well, they were free, and so on.
I had to become an "evangelist" for the internet. I learned very valuable lessons very quickly.