Guido van Rossum

But I was done working for a bit, and then the pandemic made me realize that work can also provide a source of fulfillment, keep you out of trouble.

Microsoft is a very interesting company because it has this incredible...

very long and varied history and this amazing catalog of products that many of which also date way back.

I mean, I've been talking to a bunch of Excel people lately and Excel is like 35 years old and they can still read spreadsheets that they might find on an old floppy drive.

Oh, it actually brings in money.

Oh, yeah.

A lot of the engineering, if you look deep inside Excel, there's some very good engineering, very impressive stuff.

In fact, I keep discovering that there are many features in Excel that only exists at keyboard shortcuts.

That's like, there's no logic or...

or reason to the assignment of the keyboard shortcuts because they go back even longer than 35 years.

I've never met him, but I hear...

He's just a really sharp thinker, but he also has an incredible business sense.

He took the organization that had very solid pieces, but that was also struggling with all sorts of shameful things.

especially the Steve Ballmer time, I imagine in part through his personal charm and thinking, and of course the great trust that the rest of the leadership has in him, he managed to really turn the company around and sort of,

change it from openly hostile to open source to actively embracing open source.

And that doesn't mean that suddenly Excel is going to go open source, but that means that there's room for a product like VS Code, which is open source.

Or you can work for a big company and create something new there.

Oh, inside the... Yeah.

I mean, big companies have individuals who create new stuff that eventually grows big all the time.

If that's your aspiration.