Steven Sinofsky
speaker
5,951 appearances
15 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 3d ago
Steven Sinofsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You know, I have stories of lots of sticky software and lots of arcane things, but like anyone who's ever tried to displace Microsoft Outlook as email,
very quickly learned about delegate access and having calendars owned by multiple people and all of this crazy stuff.
And like, I can tell you, there was no meeting where we said, okay, let's figure out how to make the calendar the sticky part of Outlook and make sure we handle recurring meeting exception handling well
And then you go and you find out, you know, General Motors isn't going to displace like 600,000 seats because of the calendar or some crazy thing like that.
And so it's really amazing in enterprise software what causes sticky and how you can actually capitalize on it when somebody threatens to take you out of the enterprise.
Well, I mean, SEMA co-wrote a post on SAP, which is sort of the ultimate, ultimate example of sticky software.
I mean, there is nothing, the only software that's stickier than SAP is behind the scenes and it's the software that insurance companies wrote.
And they wrote all this software like 50 years ago or 75 years ago.
And if you ever, there's no replacing it.
Like it just, it,
In fact, whenever jokes come up about businesses that are looking for COBOL programmers, it's to go and work on the insurance software that exists in every state of the union.
And in many ways, what you're seeing, like with one of the biggest successes to date in Stripe, has been somebody actually went in and for the first time in two generations, coded up the software to collect money from people
which itself had previously been an unsolved problem on the scale of insurance.
Because nobody put together the tax laws for every country, every jurisdiction, every locality, every border crossing, every currency exchange.
It's mind blowing.
And so now that is the most sticky, that is not going anywhere, ever.
Like, we'll be doing this podcast with, like, great-grandchildren 100 years from now talking about how sticky that experience was, just like I told, like, oh, you didn't know this, but the software that runs Allstate is older than me, and it's not going anywhere.
And that's because these examples are ones that codified an external force.
And that external force was the regulatory body that they embraced.
The Siemens examples of SAP, like it just codified a company.
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