Microsoft Office, every mention
61 scenes (2024), the whole family · ← back to Microsoft Office
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2024 anyone Ben Gilbert 49David Rosenthal 29Steve Ballmer 16
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft Office comes up
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 45:29 David Rosenthal Two is the five-year commitment on the part of Microsoft to ship Office for Mac.
- ▶ 45:40 Ben Gilbert The company would have been completely out of business because it was so existentially important to anyone using an Apple computer to use Office that if Office, you know, Microsoft decides, oh, we're gonna stop developing Office, people…
- ▶ 46:36 Ben Gilbert Steve Jobs wanted to message this as Microsoft believes in the Mac as a great way to use the Office suite.
- ▶ 47:41 Ben Gilbert And so we sort of have the leverage to say, hey, what if you guys invested in us and did this big commitment to Office for Mac?
- ▶ 48:03 Ben Gilbert Apple gets the win with the investment in Office.
- ▶ 57:51 David Rosenthal If you're buying Windows, you have to also buy Office or X or whatever else that we're selling in our applications group.
- ▶ 1:34:52 Ben Gilbert Yes, and like that historic announcement from Bill committing to Microsoft Office for the Mac, this partnership is also huge.
- ▶ 1:35:00 Ben Gilbert ServiceNow's Now Assist will be integrated with Microsoft Copilot and will be available directly from Office apps, starting with Microsoft Teams in August.
- ▶ 1:36:40 Ben Gilbert There's office, which he calls a four billion dollar a year business.
- ▶ 1:36:48 Ben Gilbert So you can think about it as Windows, and he said NT slash back office, but this is the enterprise, an office.
- ▶ 1:37:29 Ben Gilbert All the way back in 96 said it's the fastest growing business, even faster than Windows or Office.
- ▶ 1:39:59 David Rosenthal SharePoint was technically within Office, but it is one of these systems-type products.
- ▶ 1:40:17 David Rosenthal And what's so, like, honestly beautiful about this is they work in concert with Windows and Office on the PC client side.
- ▶ 1:40:29 David Rosenthal So, like, this is the client-server era that Microsoft really dominates here, and Microsoft within enterprises, all these new server products work best with Windows operating system devices, running Microsoft Office applications on them,…
- ▶ 1:44:26 David Rosenthal It is a first class included in the bundle of Microsoft Office, Office application that you, you know, Mr. and Mrs.
- ▶ 1:47:42 Ben Gilbert Inclusive of Windows and Office.
- ▶ 1:48:19 Ben Gilbert There's something pretty convenient that you may have noticed about Windows and Office.
- ▶ 1:48:23 Ben Gilbert They both tend to release an operating system or a new package of Office
- ▶ 1:51:21 Ben Gilbert When I was in Office, I always thought we could stop bundling new features for 10 years, and it would be fine.
- ▶ 1:51:30 Ben Gilbert Office got to this point where, and I think Steven Sanofsky even writes about this in Hardcore Software in his book and on his Substack, that at some point, they were trying to ship features that the PMs thought were great and users would…
- ▶ 1:52:30 David Rosenthal We were using Office 2003, of course, and like,
- ▶ 1:54:26 David Rosenthal So these three-year agreements that you're talking about, Ben, and that covered Windows, that covered Office, that covered all the products that Microsoft offered except, like, Xbox.
- ▶ 2:03:44 Ben Gilbert Another thing about Windows XP, there was a new release of Office right at the same time as XP.
- ▶ 2:04:08 Ben Gilbert So Windows success begets Office success.
- ▶ 2:04:40 Ben Gilbert Office also got huge market share.
- ▶ 2:05:56 Ben Gilbert And so, of course, they're gonna release a new version of Office that shows off the latest and greatest of Windows.
- ▶ 2:25:53 Ben Gilbert I worked in office, so I have a bias here when I was at Microsoft, but
- ▶ 2:25:57 Ben Gilbert They weren't super ship date driven, whereas Office would set a ship date three years in advance, and then they would hit it exactly.
- ▶ 2:26:04 Ben Gilbert Office had all these really robust procedures for shipping, you know, a triage process, an escalation process, a zero bug bounce.
- ▶ 3:22:05 David Rosenthal So Steven Sanofsky, he ends up running office product management.
- ▶ 3:22:16 David Rosenthal And Ben, like you're saying, the office culture was known as we ship, we ship product.
- ▶ 3:46:09 David Rosenthal Now, interestingly, Office and applications and software as a service actually came pretty quickly thereafter, too.
- ▶ 3:46:15 David Rosenthal Famously, they did a pilot program with Energizer, like the battery company, selling to sort of, I don't think it was like the Office productivity suite, but it was like SharePoint and stuff, I think, as
- ▶ 3:48:39 David Rosenthal Productivity and business process, AKA, Office, and that includes Office three 65 as part of that segment.
- ▶ 3:48:39 David Rosenthal Productivity and business process, AKA, Office, and that includes Office three 65 as part of that segment.
- ▶ 3:54:35 Ben Gilbert I could see if you were an Azure doubter, and you were sitting there at the top of Microsoft enjoying the Windows monopoly, the tremendous business that is Windows and Office, and thinking, why would I do anything to jeopardize this?
- ▶ 3:56:44 Ben Gilbert Office for iPad, which was super secret at the time.
- ▶ 3:57:38 Ben Gilbert And, basically, it was, hey, we just released Windows eight, we just released the Surface, and we want the marketing message for those things to be that Office is first and best on Windows, and the only tablet in the world that can run…
- ▶ 3:58:38 Ben Gilbert Like, did Microsoft ever lose a dollar for deciding to hold Office for iPad another year?
- ▶ 3:59:41 David Rosenthal It really, it was an easy win for Satya during his first year to say, culture has changed here, we are shipping Office on iPad.
- ▶ 4:07:11 David Rosenthal The Office for iPad discussion we had a minute ago, you know, I think was emblematic.
- ▶ 4:13:43 Ben Gilbert But the interesting thing is investors basically didn't think Windows and Office businesses were sticky, and they were only valuing the newer bets, which was super wrong.
- ▶ 4:13:54 Ben Gilbert Windows and Office have proven to be these ridiculously durable franchises generating more revenue today than ever.
- ▶ 4:14:02 Ben Gilbert So, I mean, it is ultimately on the CEO to help shareholders understand where the value is, but shareholders obviously did not price in the retention and growth within the existing Windows and Office customers through a new era of…
- ▶ 4:44:45 Ben Gilbert Steven Sanofsky, who led Windows in Windows seven and eight, and led Office before that.
- ▶ 4:45:15 Ben Gilbert She worked closely with Steven in Office and also on Windows.
- ▶ 4:45:20 Ben Gilbert My old coworker, Anand Rajaswaran, who worked with me on Office for iPad, helped refresh my memory on what the blow-by-blow was like in those days where we almost shipped the product, then didn't, then got a new CEO, then did.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 32:49 Ben Gilbert Who ran Excel and was an executive overseeing office for a long time in the early days.
- ▶ 2:26:11 unnamed speaker Because I think it's fair to say that the Mac made Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office made the Mac.
- ▶ 2:31:34 unnamed speaker Obviously, they're working on Excel, working on other, you know, what would become the Office suite applications, you know, together for Mac.
- ▶ 2:32:40 Ben Gilbert And within the applications group, that next chapter is Microsoft Office.
- ▶ 2:33:06 Ben Gilbert And so what you've got here on the Mac in the first version of Office is Word, which they've developed in-house, File, Chart, and Multiplan.
- ▶ 2:34:00 Ben Gilbert So in this earliest Microsoft Office,
- ▶ 3:07:33 Ben Gilbert It's Microsoft Office, and it's the fact that the whole workforce is already using Microsoft Office.
- ▶ 4:00:01 Ben Gilbert This is a little bit later in history, but I did always think it was absolutely incredible when I was at Microsoft and we would ship a version of Office every three years, I worked on Office 15, that the entire 6000 person organization had…
- ▶ 4:00:01 Ben Gilbert This is a little bit later in history, but I did always think it was absolutely incredible when I was at Microsoft and we would ship a version of Office every three years, I worked on Office 15, that the entire 6000 person organization had…
- ▶ 4:01:23 Ben Gilbert It's funny, the Process Power, I would say, is stronger in Office than Windows.
- ▶ 4:17:37 Ben Gilbert So, so great to get his perspective, especially about the early days of office and the applications group.
- ▶ 4:17:49 Ben Gilbert For a long time and oversaw a lot of the different stuff in the applications group, and I believe also ran office.
- ▶ 4:19:34 Ben Gilbert And how different the go-to-market motions were for Windows and Office.
- ▶ 4:21:16 Ben Gilbert And, I mean, to be frank, I had a very opposite strategy in mind, but I was a new hire out of college, individual contributor PM, and, you know, it was still the Windows company then, and Steve was championing the Windows strategy, and I…