Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More - Part 2

In part one, I recapped the two years since we "hit refresh" on SharePoint. In this part, I will share my journey towards this transformation that I hope helps others as they learn and take initiative in their own careers. In the final two parts, I will share an insider view of our team’s evolution and thoughts on what we will have then announced at the next SharePoint Conference on May 21st. Register today as we hope to see you there!

Like many people, I learned my most powerful lessons in my first job. As an undergraduate at New York University, I joined a talented investment firm as a software developer. I saw the potential for the personal computing sea change to enable us to deliver better insights to our clients than the much large banks were producing on their mainframes. Fortunately, the president of our firm bought my pitch and empowered me to go for it.

I learned the joy of inventing something new with the latest technology. I bought the fastest PC (the Compaq Deskpro 386 which beat IBM to 32-bit by 7 months), programming language (the Lattice C compiler) and printer (the behemoth HP LaserJet 500 Plus). I wrote directly to the video buffer (0xB8000), modified the ISAM library source to get our database indices in RAM and used a stop watch to tune my code for the optimal mix of HP PCL raster and vector graphics to generate better charts in a fraction of the time than the mainframe printers (and the first release of Excel ...). Our clients loved it. We even pitched our software to one of the largest banks in New York for their own clients. Their senior banker told me they had the best mainframes and programmers and would lap us. Six months later he gave up and became a client of ours. I learned many lessons including embracing the latest technologies in novel ways and don’t think like that banker later in my career which I can relate to when Satya Nadella references Carol Dweck’s Mindset.

I decided to go all-in on the technology revolution and join Microsoft (one of my interview questions was the difference between the 386 and 286 microprocessor). My first job was evangelizing graphical user interface and client-server development with Windows NT including meeting with some of the same banks that I encountered in my first job. Over the next phase of my career, I learned from so many people at Microsoft about balancing vision and execution as we created and grew SharePoint. One of my favorite quotes in that period was from Bill Gates, "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten". I was fortunate to be part of this when Bill announced that what would become the Microsoft Cloud would be available to all organizations at the SharePoint Conference 2008. There were lots of skeptics then but I am excited to write this post ten years later - on the day that Satya and our CFO, Amy Hood, announced that Office 365 has grown to 135 million monthly active users. I am profoundly grateful for the feedback and dedication of our customers, partners and team in this journey.

The first serious PC that fueled the computing revolution: the 32-bit Compaq Deskpro 386. Satya and I joining Tom Button at DevCast to launch rapid GUI and client-server solutions with Visual Basic and SQL Server which later inspired SharePoint. Steve Ballmer’s brilliant “We’re In” ad with SharePoint appropriately positioned! The one time we printed our architecture documents to commemorate the launch of Office 365 - we've written a lot of code to scale the service 100x since then.

After leading Program Management for Office 365 for a couple years, I switched to a new role running Corporate Strategy working for Amy when Satya became our CEO. It was an incredible learning opportunity to watch Satya’s drive on vision and culture combined with Amy’s discipline on resource allocation and accountability for forward looking performance metrics. They are phenomenal leaders at a pivotal time for our company and industry. I also got to step back to take a more outside-in perspective learning from teams across Microsoft and numerous startups. I later returned to NYU for a week as an executive in residence where I presented on technology disruption perspectives.

But I was getting itchy. So I started coding again on evenings and weekends with technologies from inside and outside Microsoft. I loved our new Visual Studio Code. I used Node, Angular, React, Meteor and other open source technologies. I particularly liked the work that developers from Facebook had done with React because it was simple and their performance tricks with the browser DOM that reminded me of what I’d done in C working with the PC video buffer. I could squint and see React components turning into SharePoint web parts which later became the SharePoint Framework and how we are integrating a lot of the Office 365 experiences. I also wrote a short paper that much later led to a skunk works project I funded and we will announce at the SharePoint Conference in a few weeks. But more on all this in the next two posts. After a year looking broadly, I was ready to get back to product development.

Then on June 22, 2015, I got a one line email from Satya saying “SharePoint needs you back - come by tomorrow”. Satya and the leader of Office 365, Rajesh Jha, were excited about our future and challenged us to take SharePoint, OneDrive, our connections with Office and the rest of Microsoft and our incredible community to the next level. I thought about it for a day and then decided to attack it with the freedom and energy of that 22 year-old with a C compiler. I sat down with the amazing ODSP leadership team – Ken Fry, Omar Shahine, Adam Harmetz, Jason Moore, Navjot Virk, Doug Pearce, Phil Smoot, Dave Walsh, Steve Bailey, Russ Moore, Greg Friedman, Naresh Kannan, Seth Patton and many more and brainstormed for a few weeks. We were excited to come up with a bold vision with grounded execution for transforming our user experience, developer platform, architecture, engineering systems and, most importantly, culture. We were clear on our mission – empowering every person and organization with the next generation of Office, SharePoint, OneDrive and more to transform how they work. We were clear on our ambition – to blow people away by the next Microsoft Ignite Conference and grow our customer and partner satisfaction and usage far beyond our success to date. In Part Three, I will share what we did.