Let’s be blunt, we were trying to hijack Windows with DirectX and we were hijacking Microsoft’s browser strategy with Chrome. It was always about taking over… The minute they put us to work on IE the goal was instantly to own it. Everything else was just ground work.
-Alex St. John
J Allard joined Microsoft in 1991. It was his first job after graduating from Boston University with a degree in computer engineering. In the ensuing years, Allard discovered the Internet and, possibly even more importantly, the metaverse courtesy of Neal Stephenson’s breakthrough book, Snow Crash. Allard was so inspired by Snow Crash and its vision of the melding of reality and a mysterious online virtual world that he later required people who worked for him to read the book, and expensed the copies he gave out to his division at Microsoft. Skipping ahead seven years, Allard also used the name of the main character of Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist, as his Gamertag at the very beginning of Xbox Live.
There is an exchange in Snow Crash that possibly exemplifies what Allard understood about the power of the Internet and the power to shape it.
From Chapter 8, Hiro is speaking with Juanita Marquez, his ex-girlfriend:
“Did you win your sword fight?”
“Of course I won the fucking sword fight,” Hiro says. “I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world.”
“And you wrote the software.”
“Yeah. That, too,” Hiro says.
The message? He who controls the software, controls the world.
Allard is a visionary. He’s unconventional, a risk taker. He loves extreme sports and would often show up to the office in a cast from one of his many injuries. But injuries were merely a setback, and he always recovered. He continued to seek the thrill of the ride and the risk again. Allard is a spinner of tales and a predictor of possible futures that few other people could conceive.
On May 26, 1995, Bill Gates wrote a pivotal internal memo called “The Internet Tidal Wave.” In that memo, he outlined a new strategy for Microsoft. “I now assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is critical to every part of our business,” he wrote, further stating, “The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.”
J Allard is often credited with convincing Gates about the importance of the Internet and inspiring this now famous memo, most likely through his combination of technical depth and story weaving. In any case, Gates’ memo was a directive that helped shape the future of Microsoft.
Gates initially wanted to own the basic protocols and standards that governed the Internet, but according to Cameron Myhrvold, several people, including J Allard and Brad Silverberg told him, “You’re crazy. That horse has left the barn… Our only chance is to fully embrace internet standards and to do so broadly, in broadly distributed products like Windows, and if we don’t do that, we’re a dinosaur.”
So the focus of the company shifted after Windows 95 shipped. There were major reorganizations going on, and in the midst of that Silverberg started the company’s Windows Internet Division. Starting with a version of the Mosaic browser technology, Microsoft created Internet Explorer and began positioning it to unseat Netscape Navigator as the preeminent browser. At the time, Microsoft was a nonentity in the world of browsers when, if they had been paying attention, they should have been in the forefront. Silverberg put it, “People have forgotten how to defend the castle.”
Before Bill Gates refocused Microsoft on the Internet, there was exactly one person in the Internet support team, according to John Ludwig, who ran the team. Less than a year later it had grown to 700 people. This massive redeployment of personnel had a specific goal—to take Microsoft from last place into a position of dominance and control over the Internet as it related to Windows. In doing so, Gates also put Netscape directly in the crosshairs of the Developer Relations Group—most notably St. John and his accomplices Engstrom and Eisler. Since Netscape dominated the browser market, the idea would be to blow it out of the water with a super browser, and so a super browser was what they set out to create.
While St. John remained in the DRG, Eisler and Engstrom were strategically moved into Ludwig’s group. Ludwig says, “We shifted from thinking about multimedia as a separate thing, to thinking about how can we use this as an asset in the Internet world so we can be more competitive there? And so, at some point, they joined my team and started to think about multimedia and graphics in the Internet sense.” The fact that this move was strategic on their parts, that they were still working with St. John to further the DRG’s mission, came as no surprise to Ludwig. “I always knew those guys were close and talked all the time. They didn’t hide it that well.”
Manipulation Practice
Craig and I used to tease Eric that his material existence was just an interference pattern generated between Craig and me because he was the perfect combination of Craig’s technical execution power and my creativity and madness.
-Alex St. John
St. John, Eisler, and Engstrom had developed a unique partnership while they were developing DirectX. While St. John was running interference and working with developers, Engstrom would help design the product while also doing his part to distract people away from what Eisler was doing—coding. They would have discussions during their morning weight lifting sessions where they also planned and practiced their DRG-inspired techniques. The three of them would often stage seemingly “spontaneous” arguments in public, all designed to create a false sense of division in the ranks so that when all three of them did finally agree on a direction, it was notable. And to their carefully chosen audience, the theatrical and contentious disagreements, along with very cogent arguments for and against other technologies, gave special legitimacy to their well-planned conclusions and ultimate agreement.
“We met every morning at the gym for an hour to have fun, talk about the future, and figure out if we would have to do anything that day to protect ourselves,” says Engstrom. “People talk about stand-ups and scrums and all that. We did that for political survival and feature set, both, every morning, five days a week. We just did it with weights in our hands at the gym.” On the suggestion that they must have been in good shape, he answers, “Well, strong at least. Good shape might require some cardiovascular. I was the only one doing any cardiovascular at the time. I used to run around Alex and Craig when they went for their walk. But both of them were significantly stronger than me. Craig and Alex could both lift a hundred pounds more than I could. I could lift 275 pounds at the time, and Alex and Craig were lifting 370… 380. And I’m not a very tiny person.”
DRG Tips and Tricks
Plamondon was Microsoft’s secret weapon. The point was to be obscure about doing that stuff. If you look at my blog, I post these stories. Strangers will correct me going, “No. So-and-so was in charge of this.” No. So-and-so had the title of being in charge of it, but the puppeteers were at work. DRG was like the CIA. They didn’t leave fingerprints if they were doing their job right. Most people at Microsoft had no idea what we were. Sometime I’ll tell you some of the techniques I used. I used techniques to get what I wanted.
-Alex St. John
Under Plamondon, Eisler, Engstrom and especially St. John had learned the essence of the DRG’s philosophy, but they, and their fellow DRG operatives, took the essence of their early lessons and made it an art form, practicing and sharing their ideas. As promised, here are some of the methods they developed, according to Alex St. John:
Out of the Room
“DRG wasn’t a casual operation. We did exercises in manipulating people. Training exercises. One of the challenges was, what is the quickest, most efficient way to get somebody to leave your office? And so we’d have this debate at DRG, going, Ok, what is the most effective technique to get somebody who has come to your office to demand or suck up your time or talk at you, to get out? And so, each evangelist came up with their best approach to getting somebody who didn’t know what they were doing to leave their office.
“Eric Engstrom’s was he brought a huge jar of jawbreaker cinnamon balls into his office, and what he’d do is he’d sit in his office, and somebody’d came in and sat down to talk to him, he’d offer them a cinnamon jaw breaker. And of course they’d decline because you can’t talk with one of these things in your mouth. He would consume them until they didn’t burn him anymore. Then he’d pop one in his mouth, and he’d just be sucking and jawing on it while talking to them. And he said, he’d leave the jar on the floor right in front of them, and he’d keep offering it to them —go, ‘You’ve never had one of these before?’ So whatever they were saying to him, he would just go, ‘You’ve gotta try… these are the best,’ until he got them to put one in their mouths. Five seconds after that thing starts burning the shit out of their mouth, they make an excuse and leave.
“Then it was Brian—funny guy—he had his office piled with junk such that the only place to sit in his office was three inches from him. He would take a huge Bowie knife out of his desk <he says it was a Spyderco> and pick his fingernails with it and wave it around, gesticulating while he spoke. And so claustrophobic, enclosed and perilous being there that you just wanted to get the hell out. He did that during the interview with me. And I didn’t know that that was a game back then.
“So the one I came up with was shaving in the office while they were talking to me. I would put out a razor and shaving cream, and I would literally, while they were chatting. I wanted them to feel like they were literally sharing a bathroom stall with me. In the middle of the conversation, I would get some shaving cream out, spray it in my hand, and put it on my head, because I was bald at the time. I had no hair. I had just shaved it completely. And then I would just sit there and shave my head with a mirror, and go, ‘Uh huh. Yeah. Uh huh,’ and talk to them about whatever they wanted to talk about while shaving. And oh man, that got them right out.”
Into the Room
“Microsoft people hide from each other. So, they have private offices, and you’d email and if they didn’t respond, and they were in some labyrinth of offices and you didn’t know where they were across campus, you’d never find them or see them. Right? But they were all Asperger’s antisocial engineer types… couldn’t make eye contact. So if I wanted something, what I would do is I would find their office. And I would bring a book with me. I’d knock on their door and walk in their office, and sit down before starting a conversation as close to them as I could. As close to their stuff as I could. And I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m sorry to bother you.’ I’d introduce myself. And while I was talking, I’d get close, I would be touching the stuff on their desk. Putting my hands on it, fiddling with a pen of theirs. Whatever. Ask compulsive engineers… they can’t stand having their space invaded. Drives them crazy. Most of them would agree to anything to get me to leave. And it was totally friendly. And if they were hiding from me, and they weren’t in their office, I’d sit in their chair with my feet on their desk and wait, and I’d pick up something from their desk and be handling it when they came in. Because compulsives can’t stand that, and the social stress that touching their stuff and being in their space causes them makes them very agreeable to get rid of you. And so, I would be completely friendly. ‘Hey, it’s a little bug…’ It was just this little thing, and maybe this and that, and I’ll be right out of your hair. And if they didn’t do it after I left, then I’d come back and do it again until they’d just go, ‘God, what do we have to do? Please.’ It worked very well. It’s very funny, and I’m almost afraid to have it in circulation because I don’t want people to know it, because it will lose its power.” (Too late, Alex.)
Debating Challenges
“One of the other things we’d have were debating challenges, which were really argument challenges,” says St. John. “It’s funny. We actually got requests from people to have debates, because they were considered so entertaining. While working out in the gym together in the morning, we would pick a new topic to practice debate skills on. I remember I got handed, ‘Defend the argument that black and white are the same color,’ and you had to fight to the end with your best arguments, with the best case you could make, and try to win it, and you were not allowed to give up. And people witnessing us doing this didn’t know that it was an exercise. They didn’t know it was just today’s practice debate topic.
“I think one of the funniest ones we ever had was Craig Eisler got assigned, ‘You have to name two things that have nothing related to each other—at least two things you can think of that have the least in common.’ I think he picked like asteroid and love. And then argued that they have nothing in common while the other two people have to prove that they actually are very related or very similar. And so these produced insane arguments. And sometimes we’d get really mad and passionate over these arguments and yell at each other and point and gesticulate. Sometimes we’d end up just breaking down laughing.”
Teleporting
“Another one was teleporting, which Ken Fowles taught me. And teleporting was the art of getting past conference security without a badge. And so, it was a collection of techniques. What can you do to walk right into a meeting that has security on it without being stopped? We had a whole bunch of techniques that we’d come up with for doing that, so we used to have a lot of fun testing those. But years and years later, I was telling some Sony executives about teleporting, and they didn’t believe me. And they were taking me to this huge secure party they were throwing to impress me because they were investors in WildTangent. And they challenged me to teleport past their amazing security, and I did, and it blew their minds.
“It looks like magic when it’s done, but I had a big collection by the time I left. So you had to assess in each situation how you were going to mix and match approaches, but frankly, we really enjoyed the funniest ones. So I think it was Michael Windsor who came up with the broken badge. You know you have a conference chain with a badge on it? He’d hang a chain with no badge around his neck. And then just go to walk in, and most of the time, just walking in without making eye contact works, but if the guards stopped him, he’d go, ‘Oh no. My badge is right…’ and then he’d look, like ‘Oh my god. There’s a chain hanging around my neck.’ And the security guy would always let him by. Obviously the guy was stunned that his badge was missing and walked around with a loose chain around his neck. Another one that amused me most was Ken Fowles would draw badges. And they looked like shit, like a kindergartener made them, and they always worked. He would literally—he’d walk up to them and show them a hand-drawn shitty badge, and they’d let him by. Oh, it was funny as hell.
“The thing I did that amazed most people was a technique I came up with for getting a whole bunch of people in at once, and what I’d do is I’d walk right up to the security guy, and it’s called a rolling walk. So you make eye contact with the guy at the door, and you keep walking around him into the conference slowly, while talking to him, so a dozen people behind you, while his eyes are following yours, are walking right by, behind you. And so you walk up to him saying, ‘Hey, where’s the bathroom. I’ve gotta take a piss.’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, that direction’ without even checking your badge, and I’d roll right in and go to the bathroom, and ten other people went in behind me. And it wasn’t to save money or anything. They’d always buy the badges, so of course it was just one of those exercises—practice. It was literally a kind of training exercise. Can you control minds? It’s amazing what’s invisible to people.”
The Most Valuable—A Bar Exercise
“One of the funniest ones I remember was the bar exercise at conferences. Conferences were where all of DRG would turn out, so that is where we’d have these practice events. And one of them was in the evening. The rule was, you had to go talk people out of the most valuable personal stuff you could. And the rule was that you couldn’t pay them or promise them any future compensation. They had to just give it to you. So you had to persuade people to give you whatever you could get, and the goal was to get jackets, shoes, cellphones, credit cards, girl’s underwear, with no promises. And I used to win those flat out. So I’d come home from these conferences with people’s Sony jackets, their elephant ties, credit cards, cellphones… all kinds of stuff.
“You know how I did that… got somebody’s credit card? I was at the bar, and I was ordering drinks, and I bought everybody a round of drinks at the table. Because I’m not offering them anything in exchange for money, but buy them all drinks, they go, ‘That’s really generous.’ ‘It’s my Microsoft credit card. Whatever.’ And a guy goes, ‘Wow. I wish I had a credit card that could do that.’ And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you give me your credit card, I’ll give you mine.’ And he says, ‘Really?’ ‘Hell yes. Microsoft. I can expense anything. I’m a big shot. Go ahead. Try it.’ And so he goes, ‘Oh. Ok.’ And he gives me his credit card, and everybody’s ‘What a sucker,’ and I give him my Microsoft credit card. My Microsoft credit card was dead. I’d already paid the bartender before I sat down. So I gave him the dead credit card and kept his. Of course I canceled it later when I got home, but he tried to use the credit card and it’s no good.” So that was the technique: prepay the bartender, claim you’d used your Microsoft credit card, and wait for someone to bite
The Funny Thing About Food
Another of St. John’s little exercises involved food.
“One of the things I love doing in social settings is, if you’re just around, especially in a closed space like an elevator with somebody, nothing’s weirder to people than talking to a stranger in an elevator, because you’re trapped close to each other, and people always avoid eye contact in an elevator, like ‘you’re not here.’ And so if you talk to people unexpectedly in elevators, it’s always very funny. And if they are eating something, ask if you can have a bite, or if you’re eating something, offer them a bite, and after they decline say, ‘No really. Try it,’ and see if can get them to take a bite. Or offer them a drink. It’s really funny. People have the funniest reaction to that. Because after you do that, they become incredibly familiar with you. Whether they accept the drink or the bite or not, they suddenly become very familiar. There’s something about offering or sharing food—even offering to share food—with a total stranger that suddenly makes them act like you’ve known each other for 20 years. ‘You should try this. Have you ever had one of these before?’ It’s funny. People have a very funny reaction to that.
“And if you eat other people’s food unexpectedly, it’s very funny how that happens, too. Douglas Adams told me this story in person. Now I know he wrote it in a book, but… I hired him for a Microsoft event and I got to spend some time with him, and one of the stories he told was funny as hell, and it was a true story apparently. He was in a train station and he had some time to wait, so he figured he’d get some cookies or crisps and he’d read the paper. So he bought some crisps and the paper and he went set the crisps on the table and sat down to read his paper, and somebody else comes and sits across from him at the table. And while he’s sitting there reading the paper, the person reaches across the table, picks up his crisps, opens the bag and eats one. And he said, ‘Being British, we don’t have any tools for coping with this.’ And he goes, doing what any red-blooded Brit would do in a circumstance like this. ‘I ignored it and pretended it wasn’t happening.’ He didn’t say, ‘Those are my crisps.’ ‘So I reached out and I ate a crisp and put it back, hoping that would indicate to him that these were my crisps, and a few seconds later the guy took the bag and ate another one of my crisps. I didn’t want to make eye contact with him, but I took the bag back and ate a crisp, and we went back and forth this way until the crisps were gone.’ And he goes, ‘The entire time I was just livid. I couldn’t believe this guy was eating my potato chips in front of me, and not even having the courtesy to notice that he was consuming my chips. And so finally the guy went to catch his train, and I sat there reading my paper in frustration that this had just transpired, and what could it possibly mean. Finally, I got up to go and I picked my paper up, and laying there on the table, under the paper, was my bag of chips.’”
Room Number Challenge
James Plamondon adds one more DRG game, which occurred whenever they checked into a hotel together. “We’d compete to see who could get the room with the highest room number. Every tactic was fair game, so long as it did not make the front-desk person aware of the competition.”
Impossible
Engstrom had his favorite tactic, which involved just being impossible to work with. “Well, everybody had a hard time working with all of us. So it really depended on who you were, which one of us you found most impossible to work with. And we did it that way on purpose, so from the marketing side, I was impossible. Everyone had to go through Alex. And from the engineering side, Alex was impossible, so everyone had to go through me. It was all broken up neatly so there was always somebody that backchannel information could come through if we pushed too hard. We’d stage arguments among the three of us, all get mad at each other because I was being a prima donna, Alex was taking all the credit, blah, blah, blah. We wouldn’t script them or anything. It wasn’t necessary. It was just fun.”
Ty Graham was one of those rare people who had no problems with Engstrom. “For whatever reason, I didn’t flip Eric’s bozo bit*. I found him useful, or he found me useful… something like that.” But Graham does acknowledge that Engstrom could be difficult. “Eric was a big pain in the ass back in those days. Like if I wanted to get a picture of Eric for a speaking engagement at WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) for example, and I would show up with a shirt and a comb and a camera and the whole setup, I’d have to camp out in his office and cajole him into putting on a shirt with a collar, sitting down… just a big pain in the ass.” Still, Graham acknowledges the pressure that both Eisler and Engstrom were under while completing DirectX. “They were just… besides being frazzled, they were prickly personalities at best, with the time they were putting in and how fast they were going… that was amplified, but Eric was never obnoxious to me.”
*In this context, “bozo bit” refers to dismissing someone’s input because they aren’t worth listening to.
Elite Manipulation Task Force
“The truth was, I used to be a magician when I was college age, so I learned a lot of that there. So DRG came very naturally to me. But I really didn’t do that stuff maliciously. I didn’t try to be a con man, but you just go, if you want to have influence and get what you need done, it was a very powerful way of being. So people didn’t realize that evangelists were—how do you say it? Trained to that degree to be that way. One of the things I wish history would know is that we weren’t just there to talk people into using the Microsoft APIs. That group was kind of Microsoft’s elite manipulation task force.” (And now they know, Alex.)
Boss Killing
One of Eisler’s and Engstrom’s—particularly Engstrom’s—favorite pastimes at Microsoft seemed to be “boss killing.” “They were definitely boss killers,” observed John Ludwig, “and they would know how to hit those buttons, and they would identify those quickly in people, and they would know how to really get their bosses worked up.”
Engstrom freely admits to his boss killing habit (meaning getting them fired, of course). “Paul Osborne. Heidi Brussels, ‘Brussels Sprouts’ is what we called her. Steve Banfield. He was the guy that tried to get me fired. Richard Best, who came and went quite quickly. The others were pre-DirectX 1. And then Joel Segal, who we really liked, but he just couldn’t keep up. He was getting smeared like a banana over the front of the windscreen. And he brought in Richard Ness, who lasted eight weeks.
“Like one time they were going to fire me, and Alex found out who they were going to use to do it, and so I showed up and didn’t take the bait. Of course they had a senior person there, a VP of something, to watch the explosion and realize I was impossible to work with, and yet nothing happened, so my boss got fired over that. At the time, I started collecting bosses that I could get rid of. One, two, three, four… I think it was six in a row. At one point, a former boss of mine went to the head of the division and maneuvered to try to get control of DirectX. And his boss’s only comment was, ‘Why would you want to put your head in that guillotine?’”
Engstrom explains why his bosses had to go. They would often take credit for the work that Engstrom and his teams did, but often as not, even when they did try to manage things, Engstrom believed they did so poorly. So, they had to be dealt with. “We would let them be in the room when we were having a discussion about something, and we’d just leave out something important. And then they would run off and explain this great genius idea they had and how they’d managed to win us over, and blahblahblah. And we’d just make sure they were dead wrong the next time they gave a presentation. And that was that. Goodbye. It was great. You know, like when you tell three different people you don’t trust slightly different stories, and then we can see what pops up. It worked great… over and over again. It was amazing.”