In 1993, Word 6.0 was the biggest release, feature‐wise, Microsoft had ever produced.
In addition to all the new features, the team had another very large objective. Their code base had diverged, and it was extremely slow and costly for Microsoft to implement Word separately for each platform: Windows, DOS, and Mac. This code convergence effort was supposed to save Microsoft substantial development time, and—they tried to convince themselves—improve the offering since Word would have the same features on every platform.
It also meant that there was great pressure to get the release out so they could start to gain the efficiencies of a single code base.
At the time, Word for Mac was a relatively small market. It was only $60 million, versus Windows, which at that point was more than a $1 billion market. If you remember, back then Windows machines absolutely dominated, and the future of Apple was not a sure thing. However, the Mac community was also very vocal—with passionate fans of their platform—and this community had very little love for Microsoft.
PowerMacs were just hitting the market, which had significantly faster chips and more memory. Most of the team members were using those new computers because the Word 6.0 beta in its early days was just too slow on regular Macs. Of course, most of the Mac user base was not on new PowerMacs—they were on regular Macs. Hardware upgrade cycles were much slower then.
So, when Microsoft released the most “full‐featured word processor ever for the Mac,” it crawled on their Macs—we're talking two minutes just to start it up.
The community immediately started posting in newsgroups that Microsoft was trying to “kill the Mac.” Hate mail started streaming in from everywhere, including e‐mails directly to Bill Gates, who would forward them to the team with messages like “This is depressing MSFT's stock price. Fix it.”
Enter Martina Lauchengco, a young product manager recently out of Stanford, whose job it was to help turn this around.
The team quickly learned that, while it may be a worthwhile objective to get to a common code base, it's an empty victory if the product that results is not good. Moreover, users choose their devices and platforms because they value what's different, not what's the same. From the customer's point of view, they would rather wait a little longer and have a better platform‐specific solution, than simultaneously ship a generic product on all platforms.
The team ended up focusing hard on performance and taking advantage of what the Mac could do. They looked at when and how to load fonts, since Mac users tended to have so many more than Windows users, and ensuring all Mac keyboard shortcuts still worked.
They focused on word count—which is used 10 times a day by every press person—to make sure that it was lightning fast, as the press used the feature as their performance barometer. They even made it faster than the feature on Windows.
The result was that in a couple of months they produced a 6.1 release that was sent to every registered user with an apology letter—signed by Martina—along with a discount coupon for future purchases.
This is a good example of how hard it can be to do the right thing for the customer, often in the face of massive pressures. But that's exactly what strong product managers figure out how to do.
The release succeeded in fixing the perception problems, but more important, it genuinely made the version dramatically better for the Macintosh. It was a product the Mac team could be proud of and what the team felt they should have delivered to market in the first place.
This is a good example of how hard it can be to do the right thing for the customer, often in the face of massive pressures. But that's exactly what strong product managers figure out how to do.
In subsequent years, not only did Microsoft once again decide to diverge the code base, they completely separated the teams into different buildings and business units and had them fully embrace all things Mac. Strategically, it was a complete 180.
It's hard to estimate how important this was to both Microsoft and Apple. Even today, more than 20 years later, many businesses and consumers consider Word and the rest of Office absolutely essential to using their Mac for business and personal use. What started then became a multibillion‐dollar win for both Apple and Microsoft. There are more than 1 billion Macs and PCs running Office around the world.
Martina has gone on to have a remarkable career in both product management and product marketing. From Microsoft she went on to Netscape, where she was responsible for marketing of the Netscape browser, and then Loudcloud. And now I'm happy to say she's been my partner at SVPG for more than a decade, and she also teaches marketing at University of California, Berkeley.
Let me also add that there are few things as powerful as a marketing person who's also strong at product. The combination is amazing.