I think in those days we were trying to be a consumer focused company, and then with NT and everything else, we ended up becoming a pretty powerful enterprise company. And people forget that that was an issue for us. I remember reading in the press, it would be Novell or it would be Sun Microsystems, and guys saying, hey, they can never do it. They can never span enterprise and consumer products.
-Cameron Myhrvold
The Developer Relations Group was the brainchild of Cameron Myhrvold and Steve Ballmer, formed ostensibly to encourage developers to develop applications and tools for Microsoft’s software and to help them be successful in doing so. Guy Kawasaki, who spearheaded Apple’s evangelism program, had become practically a cult figure, and in doing so, he had helped raise Apple’s credibility with developers while—intentionally or not—affecting developers’ attitudes about Microsoft. So, while it’s fair to say that Microsoft was responding to Apple’s evangelism success, there was more than just evangelism envy involved.
Bill Gates was obsessively competitive, and the growing success of the Apple Macintosh platform, as well as ongoing lawsuits over the GUI interface and the use of the mouse, had put them squarely in his sights. According to developer relations specialist Alex St. John, “Bill Gates had a fierce competitive frustration with Apple and could be said to be nearly obsessed with crushing his only real consumer OS rival.”
*NOTE: This is the first of several chapters devoted to the Developer Relations Group (DRG). When I titled my book Game of X, I considered the double meaning of video games and the games played by certain people at Microsoft, both internally and externally. DRG was one of those organizations within Microsoft with a very game-like mission, and a crew of evangelists who were, in their way, expert game players. And their efforts and philosophy lead in a very clear path toward Xbox in the end.
In an early response to Apple’s success, Microsoft had fired up a developer relations group of sorts in the mid-1980s, run by Scott Treseder. This early group was comprised primarily of ex-salespeople taken from Microsoft’s OEM group, but according to Cameron Myhrvold, it wasn’t very effective. Myhrvold had observed Treseder’s team and had come to realize that his evangelists couldn’t really interact effectively with developers because they lacked the technical skills to do so. Their outreach was also unfocused and seemed to lack a clear strategy. Treseder’s team ultimately fell apart, but the need for developer relations didn’t go away. Developers were the lifeblood of a software or hardware platform, and Apple was winning the battle for their loyalty.
Cameron Myrhvold
Seattle natives, brothers Cameron and Nathan Myrhvold co-founded Dynamical Systems Research Inc., which was developing multitasking solutions for the PC. In 1986 they sold the company to Microsoft for $1.5 million and became Microsoft executives. With only a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Cam Myhrvold ultimately became a vice president in charge of the Internet Customer Unit, but before that, he helped form and direct the Developer Relations Group, often referred to simply as DRG. His brother Nathan became a senior VP and helped pioneer Microsoft’s Internet strategies and founded Microsoft’s research division. (More on that later.)
Technical Evangelism
And the thing that was fascinating was that Microsoft’s interpretation of DRG was to think, not only are we going to hire charismatic engineers that people like and want to work with, but we’re going to figure out how to use our influence with the market to really destroy major competitors.
-Alex St. John
The Macintosh had opened people’s eyes. It became clear that DOS was not the only operating system, and that the next dominant operating system for the PC would be up for grabs, with several companies positioned to develop it. Microsoft’s strategists, including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, knew that owning the operating system was the key to success, and if DOS was becoming obsolete, they would have to be the ones to create its successor. Once they created the operating system, the most important way to make it dominant was to have it run applications that people wanted, and for that they needed software developers, both internally and externally. As Cameron Myhrvold observes, “‘Nobody in the world ever buys an operating system; they buy an application. And if the application they buy happens to require your operating system, then boy, you just made a sale.”
Eric Engstrom, who was one of Myhrvold’s early evangelists still remembers what he was told on day one: “It’s my first day there, and he said, ‘We are competing for a scarce resource. There are only so many desktops with computers on them. Period. So if somebody is putting a computer application on a desktop that’s not running Windows, I want to know why. And I want somebody out there talking to the people who make that feature, and winning them over. If we have to pay them a little bit of money, if we have to put a new feature in Windows, if we have to give them better marketing access so their consumers…’ It was literally total market share. Just about getting every single customer.”
Apple’s promotion of the Macintosh placed the word “evangelism” square onto the map of people’s consciousness. A word that once had religious connotations became associated with Steve Jobs’ mission to promote the Macintosh and its approach to personal computing. While many people who were involved with computers in the early 1990s had heard of Guy Kawasaki and his work as Apple’s evangelist, far fewer people have ever heard of Cameron Myhrvold or James Plamondon, Craig Eisler or Eric Engstrom. Alex St. John became notorious in some circles in retrospect, but he was never the public figure that Kawasaki became. However, fame and notoriety are not always synonymous with accomplishment. At Microsoft, the evangelists took on many roles, some of which scrupulously avoided the limelight… while others sought to make titanic waves.
As a strategic thinker, Myrhvold’s vision of evangelism diverged from Apple’s in some significant ways, the first of which was that he would only hire technical people instead of the sales-oriented people that Apple employed. “I was going to hire people who understood the technology and could talk the talk with developers, because we didn’t have the scale to go out and touch multiple points inside of a software vendor.”
Using his “technical evangelists,” but with limited resources, Myrhvold decided to narrow his targets. “So it’s like, if you can touch one point within a software vendor, and you’re trying to get them to make this change and write for our operating system, who are you going to talk to? Are you going to talk to the CEO? Are you going to talk to the investors? Are you going to talk to the VP of marketing? Are you going to talk to a sales guy? And I decided it was the engineering guy.”
Myhrvold also targeted his evangelists by technical domains instead of by geographical regions like Apple. For instance, if they were going after developers of medical software, they hired someone with both medical and programming background to evangelize with those developers.
Clearly DRG was not created to evangelize DOS, which already dominated the existing market. DRG was created for what came next, and with the introduction of Microsoft’s next-generation operating system, the role of evangelists to promote the new platform would be critical.* The Mac, with its graphical user interface (GUI), had disrupted people’s perceptions and expectations, and for the first time, DOS was looking like a backward technology. Microsoft’s response was Windows.** Windows 1.0 was first announced in 1983 and was released on November 20, 1985.
*DRG initially evangelized IBM’s OS/2, and had to go back to their ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and convince them to drop OS/2 for Windows.
**Windows was originally code-named Inteface Manager, but (fortunately) the name Windows was ultimately chosen instead.