Steve Ballmer
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So today we're very familiar with suite, creative suite over at Adobe. Software is sold this way. This was kind of the first time. And so what was actually happening is all of the bundling was happening in pricing, in marketing, and in manufacturing. And so you sort of had a single box that that they would ship with the different applications. By 1988 or 89, it was Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
They're very different things, but they're getting sort of bundled together in a way to be sold to customers. But there's no product integration. And so you don't have the ability to do this very nice copy-paste from an Excel table and just paste that into Word. That whole idea is pretty far away. So in this earliest Microsoft Office, it was just, how can we...
They're very different things, but they're getting sort of bundled together in a way to be sold to customers. But there's no product integration. And so you don't have the ability to do this very nice copy-paste from an Excel table and just paste that into Word. That whole idea is pretty far away. So in this earliest Microsoft Office, it was just, how can we...
bundle something for a cheaper price if you buy all three and make marketing easier for us to kind of have this unified message.
bundle something for a cheaper price if you buy all three and make marketing easier for us to kind of have this unified message.
So we've now sort of set the stage of Microsoft's doing a lot of stuff. They're hedging a lot of bets. They're not totally sure which strategy is going to win out. They're not sure which platform is going to win out. They're not sure if they're more of a systems company or an application company. But what they are unified on is we make great software for personal computers.
So we've now sort of set the stage of Microsoft's doing a lot of stuff. They're hedging a lot of bets. They're not totally sure which strategy is going to win out. They're not sure which platform is going to win out. They're not sure if they're more of a systems company or an application company. But what they are unified on is we make great software for personal computers.
And I think anything that fell into that purview, they were willing to explore. They didn't really have hard boundaries between we'll do anything to make our operating systems great, or we'll do anything to advantage our applications, or even we think we're an enterprise company, we think we're a consumer company. They just didn't have well-formed opinions yet.
And I think anything that fell into that purview, they were willing to explore. They didn't really have hard boundaries between we'll do anything to make our operating systems great, or we'll do anything to advantage our applications, or even we think we're an enterprise company, we think we're a consumer company. They just didn't have well-formed opinions yet.
It was just we make software for personal computers.
It was just we make software for personal computers.
Right. Lotus Notes was crazy. It was a word processor, an email service, and it was a platform on which you could write other applications.
Right. Lotus Notes was crazy. It was a word processor, an email service, and it was a platform on which you could write other applications.
Which is so funny. I don't think at this point in history, the lines were clearly formed among the executives yet. Like Steve wasn't running the global sales force and Microsoft wasn't an enterprise company.
Which is so funny. I don't think at this point in history, the lines were clearly formed among the executives yet. Like Steve wasn't running the global sales force and Microsoft wasn't an enterprise company.
Steve was one of the smart executives and they were a software company and someone had to manage getting the software out the door. So Windows 1.0 comes out. It's bad.
Steve was one of the smart executives and they were a software company and someone had to manage getting the software out the door. So Windows 1.0 comes out. It's bad.
Yeah, the idea of Windows overlapping on top of each other, that was a sort of uniquely Mac thing and a thing that smart engineers at Apple figured out how to do that in a performant way that offers good user experience. I would classify Windows 1.0 as like a half step between command line and an actual graphical user interface.