With so much talk about “breaking up” companies, it is interesting to take a different perspective—what is it like to be on the receiving end of a court order to break up the company you work for? This week in June 2000, in US v. Microsoft the breakup was ordered. 1/4
2/ Microsoft was ordered to break up into two companies, Applications and Operating Systems. As with many remedy orders, there were a lot of questions (like what is an operating system or an application??). But mostly what problem was this solving?
3/ The separation of Windows and Office wasn’t at the heart of the complaint, which came about because of the pricing/licensing of Windows and what features go in Windows. So many people thought Office came with Windows and benefitted from some secret information.
4/ There was little information. Our Office team of 2,000+ people had many questions. How did we feel? What did we say?
2/ The spring/summer of 1994 was a weird time at Microsoft. Business was going gangbusters. It appeared as though we would make a "remarkable" pivot to the internet (though the story would not be told for 2 years). BUT strategically and culturally there was a lot of confusion.
3/ We were selling tons of Windows 3.x but all attention was on the delayed release of Chicago (Win95). We were selling tons of Office 4.x but Office had "dribbled out" one new product at a time. Lotus even made fun of us in an ad.
Twitter launches its first subscription service // Whenever a company pivots to subscription, we can assume teams spent inordinate amount of decks/whiteboards drafting “subscriber only” features. It is easy to second guess all this or … 1/ cnbc.com/2021/06/03/twi…
2/ quickly arrive at come your own favorite subscription offering. There’s always a chance company missed/s an idea, but given the consternation, it is unlikely. What’s missing is a longer term context for the offer (goals, features) v. immediate goal of pivot/transition.
3/ Along with features, the team will endlessly debate price points, number of offerings, and upsell strategies. If you use the 4 P’s framework, this pivot is literally the stuff dreams (and stress) are made of. It takes time to play out. // END
“My Performance Review (and An Expense Report)”— How do you figure out if you’re doing a good job in a staff role like the one I had when I was billg’s technical assistant. It is more difficult than it might seem. New post in “Hardcore Software” 1/ …rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/030-my-perfo…
2/ Tempting to think you sit down with the CEO, talk through specific goals, then measure progress during 1:1s and so on.
But all of that is very high overhead for a CEO, especially one not pre-disposed to management :-)
As a staff person you want to amplify performance…
3/ But if doing so takes a lot of time and effort from the principle it might be costly. So you have to adapt your work style to their style and just “deal with it”.
That’s what I did. So we met almost never even though we shared a wall—we used email/ writing.
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/
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.
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.