Schillace: Google Docs won market share, but Microsoft kept the money
Sam Schillace · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · Jan 11, 2024 · at 30:49
Sam Schillace, creator of Writely (which became Google Docs) and current Microsoft deputy CTO, reflects on Google's disruption of Microsoft Office.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. Like, it's, you know we have all the users now, but they have all the money.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sam Schillace
Schillace: Crypto lacks meaningful user value even in the best case
“For crypto, I was always like, well, what if it works? Like, then I have to run OPSEC on my personal finances. That sounds dystopian. I don't want that. Like, I can't think of anything as a user that I think actually, like, is valuable here. Even in the best c…”
Schillace: Most Good Product Ideas Originate from Engineering
“I think a lot of the good product ideas, most of the good product ideas actually come up from engineering.”
Schillace: In five years, software you cannot converse with will feel broken
“I think we're gonna feel the same way about intention and interactivity in our products very soon. Like, if I can't tell something what my intent is and have it configure itself in an intelligent way, have it converse with me, whether that's a device or a piec…”
Schillace: AI will make pixels free like the internet freed distribution
“I think the way that the internet made distribution of information free, I think AI is going to make pixels free.”
Schillace: AI found more use cases in one week than crypto did
“Just to kick cryptos corpse one last time. Like there was some tweet, like at the beginning of the year that I saw that somebody was like, yeah, it took like the AI bros, like a week to come up with as many use cases as you know, crypto came up within that dec…”
Schillace: Giving multi-agent AI systems shared whiteboard memory makes them smarter
“We were trying to get multiple versions of them working together, like multi-agents working together, and we gave them whiteboard Working memory, like as a shared working memory thing to fix this problem, and that turns out to make them much smarter.”