I joined Microsoft in June 1985. I worked on OS/2, the Win32 API, MS-DOS 6.x, CAB files, Internet Explorer 1/2/3, the Java VM, a user interface prototype (“RedShark”), and MSN before leaving in August 1999.
I sat down with then-Archivist Lee Dirks on 11/4/1998 for most of two hours to answer his questions about my experiences and my predictions for the future. Let’s see how my comments from 27 years and 4 months ago have stood the test of time!
See the full ~17,800 word transcript (formatted as it was for the internal Microsoft Museum website ca. May 1999) and the full oral history video on YouTube.
Here are a few quotes and predictions:
- The Web is the Next Platform — my May 1995 memo predicting Web “apps” would surpass Windows apps (before Win95 shipped), cloud computing (storage and compute), and the importance of Internet search.
- “Sometimes I think at Microsoft we have a little hubris about, okay, well, we’re the largest market-cap company in the world now… We know everything. We never make mistakes. And we’re different. Rules or behaviors or guidance, or the way things work at other places — that doesn’t really apply to us.” — MSFT was trading about $16 on the day of my oral history session. It increased to a high of ~$36 in late 1999, fell to $10 in late 2002, and closed at $32.39 the day before Steve Ballmer announced his departure in August 2013. I exercised and sold all my MSFT stock options in 8/1999, at near the highest price 1999-2012.
- “there’s a possible future where you don’t get to charge for software bits anymore — it’s all the service that people are paying for…I think that at some point the service will be the thing that people pay for and the hardware and software costs will eventually be zero.” — mobile phone carriers already offered “free” phones in 1998. Consumers and businesses are still buying laptops, but every year Software as a Service and “cloud” platforms like AWS and Azure grow larger.
- “Never lose data…all data lives on servers.” — predicting Google Docs (2006), Dropbox (2007), iCloud/OneDrive, etc.
- “The computer is simply a secure cache for code and data.” — this is how we experience mobile phones today. On the other hand, Apple (MacOS) and Microsoft (Windows) still have not fixed this. 😦
- “Most work happens in the context of a project.” — I argued that files and apps were the wrong abstractions for users (yet that is what Windows/MacOS provided). I proposed The Windows Service, still a better vision than what Slack and Teams offer today.
- “Works great offline” — still a vision in search of a great implementation.
- “What if we said now our number one goal is to provide great service… Let’s start a new operating systems group and, from the ground up, write everything around an architecture assuming that it never gets to reboot. It never gets to crash. It never gets to give the user an error dialogue that the user doesn’t know what to do about.” — still a fantasy!
- “The way I like to describe the OS/2 project is two guys get in a car in Los Angeles. They start driving toward the east coast…the problem comes up that one of them is trying to go to Florida and the other is trying to go to New York City.” — I worked on OS/2 for my first five and half years at Microsoft.
See the full ~17,800 word transcript (formatted as it was for the internal Microsoft Museum website ca. May 1999) and the full oral history video on YouTube.
Ben Slivka 