At the time, IBM was utterly dominant in the market, so they were gnomes running between the toes of giants.
-Alex St. John
While it’s interesting to note that Microsoft had games, even back in its early days, nobody identified the company with entertainment. Early on, Microsoft was a tech company, and while today it’s hard to think of Microsoft as having ever been small and feisty, that’s how some old timers describe the company’s self-perception in the early 1990s. Even though they were already very successful by any standard, and DOS was the PC operating system, there were always competitors poised to gain the upper hand. IBM was promoting the OS2 operating system to compete with DOS. Bill Gates was constantly concerned about Apple and what Steve Jobs would do next. And when Windows was released, he worried about not being able to make it popular in the consumer markets. And so, in order to be competitive and remain so, Gates encouraged a unique company culture. And to further explore Microsoft’s history with gaming, it’s important to understand that culture and some of the major events that took place within its walls over the next few years.
Clash Culture
You have to be firm in your convictions, sound in your technical basis, and be willing to withstand waves and waves and waves of conflicts.
-Brad Silverberg
Microsoft’s hiring policies strongly favored intelligence and technical skills, and as a consequence the people who walked the halls, gathered in lunch rooms, and populated Microsoft’s offices tended to be very smart. They were also, for the most part, quite young. John Ludwig, who joined Microsoft in 1988 was one of the older ones at 28. “I was surrounded by 25- and 26-year-olds, and even younger 22- to 24-year-olds.”
Gates also favored people who could come up with great ideas and defend them. He wanted people who could create a plan, determine a direction, find an opportunity, and, especially, those who could convince others. “When I was at Microsoft, the whole challenge was to get the right people in the right seats on the bus,” says Cameron Myhrvold, a 13-year Microsoft veteran who served in multiple senior executive positions. “A lot of times you’d hire people, and they’d ask, ‘So what should I be doing?’ I don’t know what you should be doing. Your job should be to go out and figure that out, and then come back and tell me. And some people loved that… and then there were people who were like, ‘I can’t grok that.’ They were big company people and they wanted to be a cog in a wheel, and this idea that your first job is to go out and find your job just didn’t work for them. But that is how Microsoft was most successful.”
As much as Gates saw himself as being in competition with all number of outside rivals, he also encouraged competition between divisions and technology groups, to the point where some veterans report that a person could get ahead by out-yelling their competitor in the hallways. The truth is that Microsoft employees were expected to be at the top of their game. If you were in a meeting with Gates and you weren’t completely prepared to answer his questions, you would be in big trouble. If you couldn’t defend your project or your position, you lost.
According to Brad Silverberg, who headed the Windows Division from 1990 through 1995. “You have to be firm in your convictions, sound in your technical basis and be willing to withstand waves and waves and waves of conflicts. And what you have to learn about Microsoft is that people are relentless, and even if they lose a battle, they just keep coming after you and after you and after you… The only time you really know the decision sticks is when the product is on the shelf. Until then, it can still be overturned.”
Myhrvold tells a story that illustrates how competitive people were at Microsoft. Myhrvold was an executive very high up in the hierarchy at Microsoft, but for a couple of years his key card never worked at the applications group building where Microsoft’s internal applications were developed. “I later discovered the fuckers deliberately turned my card key off so I could not enter the applications group building,” he says. “I was not in the loop for tightly held information from the applications guys, but they were concerned enough about my exposure with ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) that somebody thought that I should not have access to the building. Which is pretty funny.”
Revenge of the Nerds
It’s worth remembering that everybody at Microsoft hated high school because they were nerds who were picked on by the popular kids.
-James Plamondon
James Plamondon, who would become one of the behind-the-scenes architects of Microsoft’s competitive strategy, saw Microsoft as the ultimate revenge of the nerds story. To him, the rules of high school favored the strong. In a foot race, the fastest runner would win, not the smartest. In boxing, strength and speed were more important than a deep knowledge of calculus. Popularity and glory rarely went to the smart guy.
And so, according to Plamondon, rules “didn’t mean shit” to the people at Microsoft because the rules they had grown up with had been imposed upon them by the strong, popular people. At Microsoft, everybody was smart. “It was so incredibly liberating, you can’t imagine.” At least in the 1990s, Microsoft was a meritocracy, where having the best ideas, being able to persuade people that they were the best, and being able to execute on those ideas were the ways to advance.
Microsoft veteran Jason Robar offers another unique way that people at Microsoft viewed themselves. “Bill had a particular culture that he created. A lot of people described it as a ‘binary’ culture. Either you are intelligent and capable or you’re not. If you’re intelligent and capable, you’re a one. If you’re not, you’re a zero. And if you’re a one, you really could do anything. You might have been hired to work in the Excel group, but five years later, why couldn’t you build rocket ships? Whatever task Bill decides you should be working on, you should succeed at it because you’re a one and you were intelligent enough to have joined Microsoft and be a part of that culture.”
In a culture of ones vs. zeros, there was definitely a culture of belief. Another veteran, Drew Angeloff, says, “If you took ten engineers and you just extracted them from Microsoft, and you put them in a paper bag and you shook them up and you spit them out and you said, ‘Build me software,’ and that’s their only instruction, they will figure out how to self-organize because they’re effectively like a Seal team. Every person has learned how to be independent and function, and they know how to build software, and they know how to build software a specific way, and they’re going to self-organize into a team, and they’re going to build you something. You don’t know what it’s going to be, but they’re going to build you something, and it’s going to be good.”
Nerds Against the World
If Microsoft thought it could outsmart you, you got screwed because you just weren’t smart enough to keep up. And Microsoft thought that was totally fair.
-James Plamondon
If Microsoft employees were competitive with each other, using their brains and their voices—sometimes loudly—to convince their colleagues, and often to defeat other ideas within the company, they also applied their collective intelligence to enter into new businesses, strengthen the Windows platform, and sometimes to defeat or weaken their competitors.
Jason Robar compares Microsoft in the ‘90s to Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde, or “a giant protoplasmic pseudopod organism looking for new sources of food.” He saw Microsoft always looking for new opportunities and businesses they could take over, such as printing or set-top boxes… or, perhaps, video games. Inside Microsoft, there were always groups looking for new opportunities, new technologies, and new ways to make the company grow. Internal groups often competed with each other, coming up with or adopting divergent technologies that were meant to solve the same problem, as was the case with computer graphics or consumer-oriented products. Such competition often led to bitter rivalries and campaigns to gain the upper hand using arts of persuasion and subterfuge. And nobody did persuasion and subterfuge better than the Developer Relations Group.