Janice Kapner

speaker

346 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Janice Kapner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Action Catalyst · Check Your Comms, with Janice Kapner | (Communications, Leadership, Transformation, Business) · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

But boy, in early days of my career, there was a lot of like, yeah, we had these three people working that deal.

It's so funny because now apps and services are just commonplace.

But this is where you start to sound like that old professional who's been around a long time.

It used to be software installations, right?

And when Office was making the transition from being an app that was either pre-installed on the PC you purchased or...

purchased off the shelf, maybe downloaded, but really wasn't even that common to do that, into this service, it was this big transformation that obviously financial models had been run, but you had consumers that had to change their behavior.

And when I came to Microsoft, I was acquired in through a teeny startup called Placeware, which is a deadhead competitor for WebEx.

Now, WebEx made it through the IPO process, right?

And the bubble burst literally after WebEx landed and before we did.

And it was this big platform to host virtual meetings up to 3,000 or some large number.

I can't recall.

And so scale was a differentiator.

And people weren't sure they even cared about these whole virtual meetings.

It was like virtual seminars were kind of the niche that people were using back in the day pre-pandemic when everybody learned how to do virtual meetings.

And Microsoft came calling and decided they wanted to acquire the company.

And largely on Teams, if you ever use that, the platform, a lot of that code that's embedded there, the genesis is from that place for acquisition.

And over the years, it was named different things.

And at first it was a server and then it was made into a service.

But when I was at Microsoft, they incubated the business unit initially, right?

So they acquired this little company in and their methodology when you're that small, unlike the Sprint, T-Mobile larger where we really had to integrate was, hey, we're going to incubate you under a Microsoft business leader till the business is of certain size and scale where we would plug you into mainstream marketing and mainstream sales and so on and so forth.

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