Thread by @stevesi

050. The Team's Plan in the Face of Disruption in “Hardcore Software”—previously detailed an Office team facing cacophony of “Office is being disrupted” BUT we still needed a plan—the first plan as an integrated team. And yes, people would quit! 1/10 …rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/050-the-team…

2/ While lots of technology forces were in play, none of them were close to Win32 in being able to build rich creation products. HTML 3.2+JS was getting better for display but connectivity was not yet uniform and browsers were not clearly converging. There was a force though…

3/ That force was business and enterprise sales. Business PCs were going in everywhere and were a *nightmare* to manage with the dreaded “cost of ownership”. Problem was Word, Excel, etc. treated deployment and mgmt as lowest priority and last to get done. Ack!

4/ So the plan for “Office9” literally *inverted* our priorities— change the team from machinery adept at making new productivity features for individuals—IntelliSense, formatting, document creation and editing—to a new execution machine aimed at creating tools for a whole biz.

5/ The plan—we called this the vision—was an inversion of priorities. Imagine that. The Office teach achieved all this success, was half of Microsoft, and more and we in one release decided to invert things. This became known not as “TCO is #1” but “Personal Productivity is #6”.

6/ I wrote the vision using Word’s Internet Assistant then ~3 years old. I put it out on http://officeweb which was our first team web site running in my office using FrontPage.

People were very upset. One senior product leader even quit. I got called to “discuss” this w/BillG.

7/ Changing priorities is never easy. Great people do quit. It is awful. But there’s not much you can do when faced with a change that has to be made with real clarity. Otherwise everything gets muddled.

8/ For the first time we rolled out a vision/plan to whole team—the best of months of “top down, bottom up, middle out” work. Here’s the cheat sheet. I was up until late in the AM making copies. I used goldenrod paper in the copy room. It was crooked b/c the machine kept jamming.

9/ An important thing you see in this cheat sheet is the expansion of customer segments from basically end-users and “influential end-users” to include IT professionals and CIOs. This was huge…and also boring. Much more on this to follow in future posts.

10/10 Oh, PowerPoint’s PM leader made a mobile cheat sheet—there’s one in every car.

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