4 ms·

This article sounds as if nobody on the Courier team had been prepped for a MSFT exec review. There's internal training you go through (Precision Questioning an

This article sounds as if nobody on the Courier team had been prepped for a MSFT exec review. There's internal training you go through (Precision Questioning and Answering) that teaches you what BillG's email question was: A test of whether you thought your product through. The question could have been e-mail, browsing, orientation, lefties versus righties, market segmentation, price points, or compatibility with RTL languages, but doesn't really matter. It sounds as if Allard didn't have a full answer to the very obvious email question. And that was project death, back in old-world MSFT. Read some of the old examples from Joel on his BillG review; he was mainly checking to see if you had your product completely buttoned up before letting you ship. Because if the Courier team couldn't really answer how these "creatives" integrated email into their workflow in detail, 1) how can you be certain of their other decisions and 2) they probably would have shipped a half-baked V1 that would have taken two or three years to fix, by which point you would have been ready with Win8 tablet. Sure, it's possible that he was harping on tablet email the way he threw GC skepticism at DevDiv reviews Every. Single. Time. But, given that it was email and not OneNote (the by far most-loved tablet app, IIRC), I suspect that the Courier team was having trouble turning from a fun hippie prototype team into a shipping organization with all of the details necessary to produce a solid V1 product buttoned down and BillG called them on it.

kenjackson 15y ago
But J Allard has been through plenty of BillG reviews. He did the XBox and Zune. And was one of the instrumental people that pushed Microsoft to the internet. He was one of the rising young stars at Microsoft. He must've had Bill's ear on a regular basis in the past. I suspect this wasn't the first time he heard or got that feedback from Bill. Bill probably gave him the rope in the past, hoping that J would do something stunning. And when the story didn't come together the way he hoped, Bill hung him with it. Ironically, J's market failure, the Zune, will end up being the motivating UI force for WP7/Win8 which killed his Courier.
- larsberg 15y ago
  > He did the XBox and Zune. I'm not sure on the timing, but these may have been in 2002 or more recent. At least from my experiences in DevDiv, that's around the time that BillG pretty much checked out. I think that point and the first versions of both of those products prove my point. The former really took a full generation before they figured out the market. Zune has a fantastic music service and the sharing gimmick worked quite well, but they never really managed to figure out a way for the device itself to become more than me-too in the eye of the consumer. I somehow love the idea of SteveB asking 2012-BillG to channel 1998-BillG and him just tearing into Allard, old-school review style. Particularly for some of the hippie free love divisions that don't have any former BillG TAs or the exec review culture, it would've been a bloodbath.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    At least on the XBox, Gates and Allard interacted a fair bit. From the book "Opening the XBox": "In the next meeting with Gates, Allard, Ferroni, and Thomason broke the news that the machine wouldn't be able to run the full Windows OS...Hase says he admired Allard for 'having the stones' to 'rip Windows to shreds'... Allard recalled later, 'I think that was the closest Bill ever got to strangling me. But he ultimately came around.'" The impression I get is that Allard has had his share of interaction with Gates, which is why I think this email thing wasn't news to Allard. But I suspect this time Allard couldn't convince Gates and so it was killed. But this just me being a pundit speculator.

kenjackson 15y ago

But J Allard has been through plenty of BillG reviews. He did the XBox and Zune. And was one of the instrumental people that pushed Microsoft to the internet. He was one of the rising young stars at Microsoft. He must've had Bill's ear on a regular basis in the past. I suspect this wasn't the first time he heard or got that feedback from Bill. Bill probably gave him the rope in the past, hoping that J would do something stunning. And when the story didn't come together the way he hoped, Bill hung him with it. Ironically, J's market failure, the Zune, will end up being the motivating UI force for WP7/Win8 which killed his Courier.

larsberg 15y ago
> He did the XBox and Zune. I'm not sure on the timing, but these may have been in 2002 or more recent. At least from my experiences in DevDiv, that's around the time that BillG pretty much checked out. I think that point and the first versions of both of those products prove my point. The former really took a full generation before they figured out the market. Zune has a fantastic music service and the sharing gimmick worked quite well, but they never really managed to figure out a way for the device itself to become more than me-too in the eye of the consumer. I somehow love the idea of SteveB asking 2012-BillG to channel 1998-BillG and him just tearing into Allard, old-school review style. Particularly for some of the hippie free love divisions that don't have any former BillG TAs or the exec review culture, it would've been a bloodbath.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  At least on the XBox, Gates and Allard interacted a fair bit. From the book "Opening the XBox": "In the next meeting with Gates, Allard, Ferroni, and Thomason broke the news that the machine wouldn't be able to run the full Windows OS...Hase says he admired Allard for 'having the stones' to 'rip Windows to shreds'... Allard recalled later, 'I think that was the closest Bill ever got to strangling me. But he ultimately came around.'" The impression I get is that Allard has had his share of interaction with Gates, which is why I think this email thing wasn't news to Allard. But I suspect this time Allard couldn't convince Gates and so it was killed. But this just me being a pundit speculator.