Latest / The Pragmatic Engineer / 50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott Guthrie

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50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott Guthrie · The Pragmatic Engineer

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One of the things that we did in the early days of 2014 was
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kind of just looked
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SPEAKER_01: around and said,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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I think we have an opportunity to make a couple of choices that
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will be bold and
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aggressive that give us a shot to rewind relevance with
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developers of the world.
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And if we don't,
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we're going to be on an iceberg that's going to slowly melt.
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SPEAKER_01: And at some point we're going to be swimming.
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And so we kind of had a set of meetings in spring of 2014 and
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kind of wrote on the
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SPEAKER_01: whiteboard,
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SPEAKER_01: let's be bold and came up with three big things that we said,
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SPEAKER_01: okay,
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SPEAKER_01: what can we do to become more relevant?
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the first one was we actually introduced a community edition of
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visual studio
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decision number two is let's open source.net and let's make it
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cross-platform we
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want the community to contribute code and do it under the right
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license and put it
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on github and then decision number three was as much as we love
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visual studio the
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ide let's also recognize increasingly web developers and those
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that are not using a
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compiled language are looking for something that's much more of
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a lightweight code
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SPEAKER_01: optimized editor
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SPEAKER_01: And there was a great project that had been started.
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SPEAKER_01: It was basically a web-based editor written in Node,
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SPEAKER_01: written in TypeScript,
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SPEAKER_01: but it ran in a VS Online.
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SPEAKER_01: It was great technology,
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SPEAKER_01: but at the time,
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SPEAKER_01: people weren't really looking to write code in a browser.
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SPEAKER_01: And the three different decisions we made,
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SPEAKER_01: we kind of made all those decisions,
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SPEAKER_01: I think,
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SPEAKER_01: in about an hour and a half.
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SPEAKER_01: Of the three decisions, they were all very big.
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The ones that we remember the most would be VS Code and then
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the open sourcing of .NET.
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SPEAKER_00: Microsoft was founded 50 years ago in 1975.
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So how has the company changed and how it builds developer
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tools across these five decades?
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SPEAKER_00: Today,
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SPEAKER_00: I sat down with Scott Guthrie,
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SPEAKER_00: who has been with Microsoft for 28 years,
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SPEAKER_00: created the first prototype version of ASP.NET,
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SPEAKER_00: and is currently the executive vice president for cloud and AI.
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SPEAKER_00: In this episode,
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we talk about two decades of Microsoft and how Windows became a
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success in part
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thanks to shipping programming tools like QuickSee or MFC to
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help devs build
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SPEAKER_00: programs on top of the OS.
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SPEAKER_00: how and why Visual Basic,
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SPEAKER_00: C Sharp,
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SPEAKER_00: ASP.NET,
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SPEAKER_00: and Visual Studio were created,
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the time when developers paid thousands of dollars per year to
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access quality
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SPEAKER_00: documentation over MSDN,
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how Microsoft decided to embrace open source and create VS Code
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as an open source
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SPEAKER_00: project,
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SPEAKER_00: and many more topics,
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SPEAKER_00: including what Scott is excited about looking ahead.
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SPEAKER_00: This is a rare conversation with Scott,
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SPEAKER_00: who has been with Microsoft for over more than half his lifetime,
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SPEAKER_00: and I hope you enjoy the stories and details that he shares with us.
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SPEAKER_00: So Scott, welcome to the podcast.
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SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here.
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SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
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SPEAKER_00: It is so nice to meet again,
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SPEAKER_00: especially that we've met a long time ago,
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SPEAKER_00: 10 years ago,
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SPEAKER_00: and then I also worked at Microsoft.
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SPEAKER_00: But today, I'd like to talk, just go back to way to the beginning.
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SPEAKER_00: 50 years ago, it's crazy to say that, that's when Microsoft was founded.
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SPEAKER_00: And when I think about Microsoft, my first memory is Windows.
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SPEAKER_00: But actually, it started with developer tools, right?
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SPEAKER_00: Right.
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01: The very first product that Microsoft built and,
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SPEAKER_01: and really,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: not just the first product,
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SPEAKER_01: but for,
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SPEAKER_01: for many years,
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SPEAKER_01: we were just a developer tools company.
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SPEAKER_01: And so it was Microsoft basic for the Altair and,
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SPEAKER_01: uh,
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SPEAKER_01: Bill and Paul Allen built it while Bill was still in Harvard.
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SPEAKER_01: And,
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SPEAKER_01: uh,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: the legend is they flew out to Albuquerque,
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SPEAKER_01: New Mexico,
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SPEAKER_01: which is where,
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SPEAKER_01: um,
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SPEAKER_01: the,
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SPEAKER_01: the company that built the Altair was,
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SPEAKER_01: it's a computer no longer exists,
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SPEAKER_01: obviously.
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SPEAKER_01: And, um,
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SPEAKER_01: And they brought a tape of Microsoft Basic,
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SPEAKER_01: a paper tape,
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SPEAKER_01: and they actually plugged it in and loaded it,
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SPEAKER_01: and it worked.
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And it was actually,
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they built the app Basic entirely without access to the
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computer.
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SPEAKER_01: And it was kind of the hit product for that
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that particular computer and then they expanded to other
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platforms and then
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SPEAKER_00: eventually operating systems.
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But the first dollars they made by selling basically a
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developer tool,
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a compiler,
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right?
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So like you could write basic code and it would compile to
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machine code,
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right?
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SPEAKER_00: That was the product, right?
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SPEAKER_01: I think it was an interpreter at that time.
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SPEAKER_00: The interpreter, yeah.
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But basically,
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yeah,
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I mean,
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it was literally,
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and back then that was how you kind of,
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SPEAKER_01: used computers is often you were a programmer and you actually,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: I guess today would be modern equivalent be scripting.
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SPEAKER_01: And you, you know, you built your own logic and your own applications.
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SPEAKER_01: And so,
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SPEAKER_01: yeah,
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SPEAKER_01: it's,
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SPEAKER_01: it's,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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that's one of the things that's been cool is that the company
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started as a
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SPEAKER_01: developer tools company.
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SPEAKER_01: And when you look at our,
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SPEAKER_01: what we built today,
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SPEAKER_01: whether it's VS code,
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SPEAKER_01: whether it's get out,
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SPEAKER_01: whether it's Azure,
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SPEAKER_01: we remain a developer tools company.
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SPEAKER_00: If you want to build a great product, you have to ship quickly.
4:13
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SPEAKER_00: Then you get your analytics,
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4:46
SPEAKER_00: and dashboards to track your progress over time,
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SPEAKER_00: That is S-I-N-C-H.com slash pragmatic.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: And just stepping forward from basics,
6:15
SPEAKER_00: this was 1975,
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SPEAKER_00: but in the 90s or actually like mid 80s,
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SPEAKER_00: Microsoft started to become big because of Windows.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: And as I looked into the history,
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I was pretty surprised to see that as Microsoft developed
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Windows 1.0 and then 3.0
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SPEAKER_00: and 3.1 was a big,
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SPEAKER_00: big breakthrough.
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SPEAKER_00: They always developed programs to build on top of Windows.
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SPEAKER_00: So they did Quick Basic,
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SPEAKER_00: Microsoft C,
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SPEAKER_00: and Quick C.
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SPEAKER_00: Do you think,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: having talked with early Microsoft employees and just knowing this year,
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SPEAKER_00: was this an intentional strategy?
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SPEAKER_00: Or might have this thing actually helped Windows become as big as it did?
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SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it absolutely helped Windows become as big as it did.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: at the end of the day,
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if you're building an operating system or you're building a
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cloud platform,
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You know,
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your success is very much,
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you know,
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no one buys a platform by itself.
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SPEAKER_01: They buy it for the applications that run on top.
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SPEAKER_01: And so if you don't have developers,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: building those applications,
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SPEAKER_01: you don't,
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SPEAKER_01: you don't have a business.
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SPEAKER_01: And so I think definitely in the early days with windows,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: part of the whole thesis was,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: build great tools,
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SPEAKER_01: make it easy to build applications that are great,
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SPEAKER_01: help developers be successful.
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SPEAKER_01: And if their apps are successful, we'll sell more windows.
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SPEAKER_01: And it's similar today with Azure in terms of,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: one of the things I covered in my keynote was ChatGPT,
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SPEAKER_01: which runs,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: entirely on Azure.
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SPEAKER_01: And,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: it's another great example of,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
7:38
SPEAKER_01: how do we make,
7:39
SPEAKER_01: in this case,
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SPEAKER_01: a company OpenAI successful and enable them to build an amazing app.
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And if they are successful and they're running on our platform,
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we're successful too.
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And so it's a model that I think is very much core to the DNA
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of the company.
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
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SPEAKER_00: and then in the 90s,
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SPEAKER_00: as Windows became more popular and there were these tools,
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SPEAKER_00: Microsoft did something really,
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SPEAKER_00: really interesting.
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They built some tools that allowed maybe not as technical
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developers to build stuff.
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SPEAKER_00: Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, later Microsoft Front Page.
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SPEAKER_00: And I'm now having a little deja vu of what we're seeing today,
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SPEAKER_00: but just reflecting on that time and what you've seen,
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SPEAKER_00: Visual Basic seems to still have a massive impact.
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SPEAKER_00: When I worked at a bank at J.P.
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SPEAKER_00: Morgan,
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SPEAKER_00: building software that was used by professional traders,
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SPEAKER_00: some of the traders loved using Visual Basic that they,
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SPEAKER_00: as non-technical people,
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SPEAKER_00: could write their own programs.
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And Visual Basic at the time was absolutely revolutionary
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because I remember I was
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SPEAKER_01: in high school and I was a developer on the Mac.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, System 7 had just come out.
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It was like a long time ago on the Mac,
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you know,
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pre,
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you know,
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OS 10 and everything.
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SPEAKER_01: And, you know, building a GUI application was a lot of work.
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You know,
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if you wanted a menu,
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if you wanted buttons,
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if you want a dialog.
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I mean,
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you were writing a lot of code and it was,
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it was often very error prone code.
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SPEAKER_01: Cause if you got anything wrong, it would crash.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: And,
9:06
SPEAKER_01: um,
9:07
SPEAKER_01: there were no visual designers,
9:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
9:08
SPEAKER_01: it was pretty much,
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SPEAKER_01: you kind of had to do everything from scratch and,
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SPEAKER_01: and visual basic came along and it was sort of,
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SPEAKER_01: you could drag and drop buttons,
9:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: visually lay them out,
9:17
SPEAKER_01: double click,
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SPEAKER_01: write a couple lines of code,
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SPEAKER_01: hit F5 and it ran.
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SPEAKER_01: And it really transformed development.
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And,
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um,
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you know,
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we ultimately took that same paradigm and used it with access
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for databases.
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SPEAKER_01: We also had a product, which is one of the ones I used.
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I think it was the first thing I ever got paid for was a
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product called Visual Fox
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SPEAKER_01: Pro,
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SPEAKER_01: which was another database product that was graphical.
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Um,
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and then,
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uh,
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and then extended it to things like visual J plus plus.
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SPEAKER_01: And then,
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SPEAKER_01: uh,
9:45
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
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SPEAKER_01: ultimately the visual studio family,
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SPEAKER_01: including C sharp C plus plus,
9:50
SPEAKER_01: uh,
9:50
SPEAKER_01: and others.
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SPEAKER_01: And so,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
9:51
SPEAKER_01: it's that,
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SPEAKER_01: that notion of,
9:53
SPEAKER_01: you know,
9:53
SPEAKER_01: again,
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SPEAKER_01: it was court of like,
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how do we take the friction out of what developers needed to do
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and provide,
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SPEAKER_01: um,
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great developer tools to do it and as much as you know the drag
10:04
and drop aspect of
10:05
virtual basic was revolutionary the other thing that was
10:07
revolutionary was just the
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speed with which you could run and uh it had a pioneered a
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feature called edit and
10:12
continue so you could even have the application running modify
10:17
a couple lines of
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code then push the button again and without having to kind of
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rebuild or recompile
10:22
or relaunch you could actually see the edits immediately take
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effect and that was
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SPEAKER_01: also kind of transformative like you know today we
10:30
SPEAKER_01: With JavaScript,
10:31
SPEAKER_01: we're sort of used to that kind of paradigm of make a change,
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SPEAKER_01: hit save,
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SPEAKER_01: and it just works.
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SPEAKER_01: But in the 90s, that was radical in a big way.
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SPEAKER_00: Can we just rewind back time?
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SPEAKER_00: Because I feel there's a bit of a similarity.
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Back then,
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in the 90s,
10:46
before Visual Basic and Access and Foxtrot came about,
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there was no way for non-super-technical people who knew you
10:55
learned the syntax to
10:56
SPEAKER_00: write programs.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: And these things just allowed,
10:58
SPEAKER_00: honestly,
10:59
SPEAKER_00: everyday people,
10:59
SPEAKER_00: like my dad,
11:00
SPEAKER_00: who was not a developer,
11:02
SPEAKER_00: he put together a bunch of stuff with Access,
11:05
SPEAKER_00: later FoxPro.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: And today we're in a similar thing,
11:10
SPEAKER_00: but I'd like to know,
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SPEAKER_00: do you remember what the mood was like where developers were saying,
11:14
SPEAKER_00: oh no,
11:14
SPEAKER_00: this is the end of development,
11:15
SPEAKER_00: we're not going to have...
11:18
SPEAKER_00: Was there any of this?
11:20
SPEAKER_00: And then what happened as a result of this?
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Because now we have like 20 or 30 years of looking back of how
11:26
it transformed
11:27
SPEAKER_00: software engineering and the industry.
11:28
SPEAKER_01: There probably was some,
11:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:30
SPEAKER_01: questioning in terms of like,
11:32
SPEAKER_01: oh,
11:32
SPEAKER_01: is this going to,
11:33
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:34
SPEAKER_01: mean anyone can be a developer?
11:35
SPEAKER_01: I think it's often the refrain,
11:37
SPEAKER_01: whether it's,
11:38
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:38
SPEAKER_01: that era,
11:39
SPEAKER_01: whether it's web development,
11:40
SPEAKER_01: whether it's,
11:41
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:42
SPEAKER_01: co-pilots and AI assistants now.
11:44
You know,
11:44
I remember that same pushback when Java came out and .NET came
11:47
out.
11:48
It was sort of like,
11:49
ah,
11:49
you know,
11:50
no one,
11:50
no real developer would ever use garbage collection.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
11:54
SPEAKER_01: It's really should be, you know, Malik and free.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: Um,
11:56
SPEAKER_01: and,
11:57
SPEAKER_01: uh,
11:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:57
I think the history of development and the history of computing
12:01
is really around
12:02
SPEAKER_01: how do we continue to optimize the productivity?
12:05
And I think what makes a developer successful or have impact is
12:11
not syntax and it's
12:13
SPEAKER_01: not unnecessary writing of code that can be automated.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: It's often the logic,
12:19
SPEAKER_01: it's identifying a problem,
12:20
SPEAKER_01: it's the creativity,
12:21
SPEAKER_01: and it's often the problem solving to make it work.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: And I think developers that embrace the new technology
12:29
SPEAKER_01: and build on top of it,
12:31
SPEAKER_01: end up being so much more productive,
12:34
SPEAKER_01: which ultimately means that they have better careers,
12:35
SPEAKER_01: they're more impactful.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: And so I always encourage people to kind of,
12:40
SPEAKER_01: don't assume your value is the syntax that you're familiar with.
12:44
SPEAKER_01: Assume the value is a higher level thing that you can leverage.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's true both for developer tools and languages,
12:52
SPEAKER_01: especially in the context of AI now.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: But I think it's also true in terms of cloud platforms.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: I talked to my keynote this morning at Build about
13:02
SPEAKER_01: ChatGPT.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: And if ChatGPT had been built 10 years ago,
13:07
SPEAKER_01: or certainly 20 years ago,
13:10
SPEAKER_01: a company would need to build their own data centers.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: They would need to build their own operating system.
13:15
SPEAKER_01: They would need to build their own deployment orchestrator.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: They need to build their own database.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: That's what Google had to do like 20 or 30 years ago.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what Google had to do.
13:21
And the fact that they were able to leverage things like Cosmos
13:24
DB and our Azure
13:25
SPEAKER_01: Kubernetes service,
13:27
SPEAKER_01: they now have an app that's the fastest growing in history.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: with 500 million weekly users.
13:34
And one of the stats I put in the keynote was they have a total
13:37
of 12 people on
13:38
SPEAKER_01: their infrastructure team that manages all their Kubernetes and compute
13:41
SPEAKER_01: infrastructure.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: And that type of productivity is stunning.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: And so I do think,
13:48
SPEAKER_01: I would encourage if you're a developer,
13:49
SPEAKER_01: embrace the technology and the productivity that's coming.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: And it only makes you more successful and have more impact.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: There's more than enough problems that are still left to solve.
14:00
After Visual Basic,
14:02
one of the big years was 1997,
14:05
I guess for two reasons.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: Was that the year that I remember that you joined Microsoft?
14:09
SPEAKER_01: I joined Microsoft full-time in 1997.
14:11
SPEAKER_01: I was actually an intern in 1996, but I joined out of college.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: I think I graduated in May of 1997, and I joined Microsoft on June 16th.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: And obviously,
14:24
SPEAKER_00: in history books,
14:26
SPEAKER_00: we don't look back on you joining specifically,
14:28
SPEAKER_00: but it was Visual Studio released.
14:30
And of course,
14:30
later,
14:31
Visual Studio became this really,
14:32
really powerful developer of tools.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: I started my career working on Microsoft Technologies and Visual Studio.
14:40
Back then,
14:41
you were at Microsoft as an intern before this came out,
14:45
Visual Studio came out.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: What was the story behind it?
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Why did Microsoft decide to double down?
14:51
SPEAKER_00: There were developer tools.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: I think Microsoft had their QuickSee.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: There were things that kind of,
14:58
SPEAKER_00: compared to Visual Studio,
14:59
SPEAKER_00: it looked like very early versions,
15:00
SPEAKER_00: but there were things like that.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: How did this whole development come about?
15:05
SPEAKER_00: And then why did Microsoft decide to just double and triple down on it?
15:08
SPEAKER_01: Well,
15:08
SPEAKER_01: I think one of the big things that happened,
15:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
15:11
SPEAKER_01: really,
15:11
SPEAKER_01: and we kind of,
15:13
SPEAKER_01: uh,
15:13
really started the project in 98 was both the real emergence of
15:21
Visual Studio as a
15:22
SPEAKER_01: tool and then also .NET.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: And they kind of,
15:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
15:26
SPEAKER_01: in,
15:26
SPEAKER_01: in 2000,
15:26
we unveiled kind of .NET and Visual Studio .NET together at the
15:31
PDC conference in
15:32
SPEAKER_01: July of 2000,
15:32
SPEAKER_01: if I remember.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: And, um,
15:35
SPEAKER_01: You know,
15:35
SPEAKER_01: the impetus behind that was,
15:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
15:37
SPEAKER_01: Visual Basic had been hugely successful in the mid to late 90s.
15:45
But there was still this gap in between where you had Visual
15:47
Basic or Visual Fox
15:48
SPEAKER_01: Pro,
15:49
SPEAKER_01: and then you had on the right hand side,
15:51
SPEAKER_01: in the more advanced category,
15:52
SPEAKER_01: C++.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: And C++ was, and still is, a key programming language.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: And there was MFC, right?
16:00
SPEAKER_00: The MFC library.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: There's MFC libraries.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Which I guess you can't talk about Windows development.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just C++.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: MFC made it so productive.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and there was also a thing called ATL, which is another library.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: I haven't thought of that in a long time, but yeah.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: So we had a couple different framework libraries,
16:16
SPEAKER_01: but it's still,
16:17
SPEAKER_01: if you use C++,
16:20
SPEAKER_01: MFC made a huge difference,
16:23
SPEAKER_01: but it wasn't as productive as it could be.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: And there was a sort of gap in the between.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: And part of why we created .NET was to sort of say,
16:31
SPEAKER_01: okay,
16:32
SPEAKER_01: can we create this common language runtime that could handle VB
16:37
could handle a C++ like language and could handle a bunch of
16:40
languages in between.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: And then,
16:42
SPEAKER_01: you know,
16:43
could we also avoid each language having to have its own
16:46
programming framework?
16:48
SPEAKER_01: And so like MFC only worked with C++.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: It didn't work with VB.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, the VB designer didn't work with C++.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, instead, could we build a common set of developer tools
16:57
SPEAKER_01: whether it was debugging,
16:59
SPEAKER_01: whether it was around visual design,
17:01
SPEAKER_01: whether it was around code optimization,
17:03
SPEAKER_01: profiling,
17:04
SPEAKER_01: et cetera,
17:05
SPEAKER_01: IntelliSense,
17:06
SPEAKER_01: and leverage it.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: That's where really.NET and Visual Studio really took root.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: Basically, we came up with the Common Language Runtime,
17:17
SPEAKER_01: I started a project called ASP.NET with Mark Anders,
17:21
SPEAKER_01: the two of us,
17:24
SPEAKER_01: and that was a web framework.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: When did that start compared to .NET?
17:29
SPEAKER_00: Did .NET come first or was ASP.NET parallel to all of this?
17:33
SPEAKER_01: Parallel,
17:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
17:34
SPEAKER_01: basically,
17:35
SPEAKER_01: ASP.NET started,
17:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
17:36
SPEAKER_01: I kind of wrote the original prototype over Christmas 97 to 98.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
17:42
And the prototype I wrote was,
17:45
you know,
17:46
I used some C++,
17:47
some JavaScript,
17:48
and some Java.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: It was kind of a,
17:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:50
SPEAKER_01: it was more the idea as opposed to,
17:53
SPEAKER_01: there was no code that was actually reused.
17:55
But it was,
17:55
you know,
17:55
it was this idea of like,
17:56
okay,
17:57
could you use classes?
17:58
SPEAKER_01: Could you use objects?
18:00
And could you have language productivity that allowed you to
18:03
kind of work very quickly?
18:05
SPEAKER_01: And so I started,
18:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:07
SPEAKER_01: we started,
18:07
Mark and I started showing it to a lot of people internally and
18:10
got a lot of
18:11
SPEAKER_01: excitement around it.
18:11
Sort of in parallel at the same timeframe,
18:14
the common language runtime got started.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't called .NET, but it was, it was called Core.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: It was the original, I think, code name.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: But they were kind of building a runtime that could do languages.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: They didn't have libraries, but they had languages.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: And then Visual Studio was trying to figure out,
18:33
SPEAKER_01: okay,
18:33
SPEAKER_01: we have the VB IDE,
18:34
SPEAKER_01: we have the Visual C++ IDE,
18:38
SPEAKER_01: we have this Java IDE.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: How do we merge that?
18:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, J Sharp, right?
18:41
SPEAKER_01: J Sharp.
18:42
SPEAKER_01: And then it all kind of came together.
18:45
SPEAKER_01: And so in the process of 98, these three teams sort of found each other.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: And we started working together and,
18:53
SPEAKER_01: um,
18:54
SPEAKER_01: 99,
18:54
SPEAKER_01: we built a whole bunch of stuff,
18:55
SPEAKER_01: including windows libraries and,
18:58
SPEAKER_01: uh,
18:58
SPEAKER_01: for GUI and for other things.
18:59
SPEAKER_01: And then ultimately, um, we were supposed to release it to the world.
19:03
I think it was like the equivalent of build that we called the
19:05
PDC back then.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: I think it was supposed to be February or March of 2000 and we were late.
19:11
Um,
19:11
and so we slipped it to July and,
19:13
uh,
19:13
July 2000 was when we kind of unveiled it at,
19:17
SPEAKER_01: a big event,
19:18
SPEAKER_01: much like the build event we're doing today,
19:20
SPEAKER_01: and showed the world languages,
19:23
SPEAKER_01: frameworks,
19:24
SPEAKER_01: and tools all working together.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: And that was kind of really the unveiling of .NET and tools.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: And it was pretty critical for our success in the 2000s.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: In the same way that VB really helped drive Windows client,
19:37
.NET really helped Windows Server and SQL Server and really
19:42
introduced Microsoft to
19:43
SPEAKER_01: a generation of server programmers.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
19:46
and I think one of the most iconic videos and now memes is
19:51
Steve Ballmer yelling,
19:52
SPEAKER_00: developers,
19:52
SPEAKER_00: developers,
19:53
SPEAKER_00: developers,
19:54
SPEAKER_00: sweating in the t-shirt.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: And usually, that's the only part that gets quoted.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: And people think, oh, Microsoft is all about developers.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: But when you watch the whole thing, which I did,
20:03
the whole thing that he said,
20:04
he starts at,
20:05
okay,
20:06
what's a $64,000 question?
20:08
SPEAKER_00: What the hell are we supposed to do with .NET, Steve?
20:11
SPEAKER_00: And then he goes developer.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: So as I understand,
20:14
this was about before the .NET release about how to reach
20:19
developers with .NET.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Can you bring a little bit more behind the meme?
20:24
SPEAKER_00: Because I feel there's way more depth in his statement.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I wasn't at that event, so I don't have all the cuttings.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: But I think
20:33
SPEAKER_01: I think the main point that Steve was trying to get across and,
20:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:37
you see it if you ever watched the video is just the passion
20:41
you had around
20:42
SPEAKER_01: developers.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: And his main point was just developers really matter.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: And so when people say, why are you doing all this?
20:48
SPEAKER_01: It's because of developers and developers, developers, developers.
20:51
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that is kind of the,
20:54
SPEAKER_01: just a critical nature,
20:55
SPEAKER_01: which is,
20:56
SPEAKER_01: again,
20:56
SPEAKER_01: if you want to build a platform,
20:57
SPEAKER_01: if you want to have an ecosystem that,
21:00
SPEAKER_01: You have to have developers.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: And,
21:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
21:02
ultimately developers are the ones that both build the most
21:05
interesting solutions
21:06
SPEAKER_01: and they also push the platform and apps the hardest.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: And,
21:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
21:11
I think that that was his main goal was just to get across to
21:13
the audience just how
21:14
SPEAKER_01: passionate he was around that.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't about money.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't about press.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: It's really around, are you winning the hearts and minds of developers?
21:21
And I think that's a big part of why Microsoft Build is special
21:24
is even take today's keynotes.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: It's tons of demos, lots of hands-on, live demos, hands-on, lots of labs.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: It really is an opportunity for developers to get together.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: And it's not about
21:38
SPEAKER_01: sort of chest pumping.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: It's more around,
21:41
SPEAKER_01: here's what you can do,
21:42
and how do we have a good conversation and dialogue around what
21:47
can we do better at
21:47
SPEAKER_01: Microsoft,
21:48
SPEAKER_01: but also how can we make you successful?
21:51
SPEAKER_00: And so .NET was huge when it launched, with Visual Studio hand-in-hand.
21:55
But a third part of why I think it was really successful at
21:57
this time was C Sharp itself.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Where did C Sharp come from?
22:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, it must have come from inside Microsoft, but was it
22:05
SPEAKER_00: Before .NET, was it during .NET?
22:07
Because I do remember that C Sharp kept evolving as well with
22:10
new features.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: Well,
22:12
SPEAKER_00: hand-in-hand with .NET,
22:14
SPEAKER_00: Link,
22:14
SPEAKER_00: for example,
22:15
SPEAKER_00: was a good example where it's both a language feature,
22:17
SPEAKER_00: but you needed framework support as well.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: Well,
22:20
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:21
SPEAKER_01: the real genius behind C-Sharp is Anders Heilsberg,
22:26
SPEAKER_01: especially in the early days.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Anders is still at Microsoft.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: He's still building languages.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he also is responsible for TypeScript.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: And before Microsoft,
22:36
SPEAKER_01: Anders worked at Borland,
22:39
SPEAKER_01: which is a name that most people,
22:41
SPEAKER_01: if you're not my age,
22:43
SPEAKER_01: don't remember.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: But it was an iconic developer tools company in the...
22:50
early 90s,
22:51
late 80s,
22:52
and built some amazing tools,
22:54
one of which was called Turbo Pascal.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: And Anders was the guy who wrote Turbo Pascal.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: And he wrote it originally from Denmark.
23:02
I think he wrote it when he was in Denmark and sold it or
23:05
licensed it to Borland.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: And part of what made Turbo Pascal revolutionary,
23:09
SPEAKER_01: this even came out before,
23:10
SPEAKER_01: I think,
23:10
SPEAKER_01: VB,
23:11
SPEAKER_01: Visual Basic,
23:12
SPEAKER_01: was it was just lightning fast.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: And so you could literally, on a PC with 256K of RAM,
23:22
SPEAKER_01: You know,
23:22
SPEAKER_01: it had an editor,
23:23
SPEAKER_01: it had a debugger,
23:24
SPEAKER_01: and if you hit run,
23:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
23:26
SPEAKER_01: in a few seconds,
23:26
SPEAKER_01: your Pascal app would work.
23:28
And,
23:29
you know,
23:29
he added good language features into Pascal and really built
23:32
that.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we were very fortunate.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: He joined Microsoft in the mid-90s,
23:37
SPEAKER_01: along with a bunch of Borland employees,
23:39
SPEAKER_01: and really brought both that developer ethos,
23:42
SPEAKER_01: he kind of really helped rejuvenate the developer ethos at the time,
23:45
SPEAKER_01: and then also just a language sensibility.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I've worked with Anders now for 25 plus years.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: And he's just,
23:53
he's absolute genius in terms of understanding both what to add
23:58
into a language and
23:59
SPEAKER_01: what not to.
24:01
And there's a real aesthetic where it's easy to kind of just
24:05
throw in the kitchen
24:05
SPEAKER_01: sink into a language,
24:07
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:07
SPEAKER_01: but how do you make these things make sense?
24:09
How do you,
24:10
you know,
24:10
you mentioned Link,
24:11
which was a language query technology.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: And
24:16
SPEAKER_01: You know,
24:16
I think part of what made the elegance of Link at the time so
24:20
great was it built on
24:22
SPEAKER_01: generics,
24:23
SPEAKER_01: which was also built into the language,
24:25
SPEAKER_01: which then composed into the runtime.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and generics in C Sharp was very powerful.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
24:30
SPEAKER_01: and it was,
24:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:31
SPEAKER_01: at the time it was a big differentiator versus Java,
24:33
SPEAKER_01: which didn't have generics when C Sharp first introduced it.
24:37
SPEAKER_01: And just the way that Anders kind of saw over multiple generations,
24:42
SPEAKER_01: okay,
24:42
SPEAKER_01: we're going to add generics into the CLR,
24:44
SPEAKER_01: We're going to add it into the language.
24:46
SPEAKER_01: And then the next version, we're going to come up with link.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it was just, it's, it's been sort of a mastery to see.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: And I think versus other languages,
24:55
SPEAKER_01: there's great continuity throughout it versus,
24:58
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:59
SPEAKER_01: different languages.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: I think sometimes have taken kind of a left turn or right turn.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: And not always a kind of linear progression.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: And they've taken detours.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's been great to see the way Anders is,
25:13
SPEAKER_01: both with C Sharp and also with TypeScript,
25:15
has kind of had a vision that he's built on top of that really
25:20
has a bunch of
25:20
SPEAKER_01: consistency and sort of common direction over time.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: And then in the early and mid and late 2000s,
25:30
the Microsoft ecosystem was really special in the sense when I
25:32
worked at one of my
25:33
SPEAKER_00: first companies,
25:34
SPEAKER_00: we were paying $1,000,
25:37
SPEAKER_00: $2,000,
25:51
$3,000 per developer to access Visual Studio together with C Sharp,
25:43
SPEAKER_00: ASP.NET,
25:44
getting access to the different software like SQL Server and
25:48
IIS so we could
25:48
SPEAKER_00: develop and use them because licenses were very expensive otherwise.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: And to MSDN library.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: Now,
25:54
I just want to pause on the MSDN library because I've never
25:56
really seen a company
25:57
do this before or after where this was before Stack Overflow
26:02
and even before having
26:03
SPEAKER_00: good things on the internet.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: We would pay to access really, really good documentation.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: Early on, it was sent out on CDs because they were so big.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember,
26:13
SPEAKER_00: like,
26:14
SPEAKER_00: how or why did Microsoft get this idea of,
26:16
SPEAKER_00: like,
26:16
SPEAKER_00: let's just invest in documentation,
26:18
SPEAKER_00: especially because as a developer,
26:19
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be honest,
26:20
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:20
SPEAKER_00: like,
26:20
SPEAKER_00: it's usually one of the last things I come around to.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
26:24
SPEAKER_01: it's,
26:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:25
SPEAKER_01: I feel like I'm dating myself on this podcast,
26:27
SPEAKER_01: but,
26:28
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:29
SPEAKER_01: I think for a lot of listeners,
26:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:31
SPEAKER_01: the idea of,
26:31
SPEAKER_01: like,
26:32
SPEAKER_01: buying documentation sounds weird.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: These days, yes, but back then, we did it.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: Back then, it was revolutionary.
26:37
And part of it was,
26:38
you know,
26:38
back,
26:39
like,
26:39
when I joined Microsoft or was an intern,
26:42
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:42
SPEAKER_01: the internet was still very,
26:44
very new and there wasn't like a search engine out there that
26:49
was very good.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: And it was all pre-Google, pre-Bang.
26:52
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, HTML was still pretty rudimentary.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: You know,
26:59
SPEAKER_01: I remember up until about 2002,
27:01
SPEAKER_01: 2003,
27:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
27:03
SPEAKER_01: a lot of sites did not even rely on JavaScript or
27:07
most used very,
27:08
very minimal JavaScript because some browsers didn't support
27:11
it.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, this was pre-CSS.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: And so as a result,
27:14
SPEAKER_01: you know,
27:14
the idea of searching for documentation and reading it in HTML
27:20
in a browser was
27:21
SPEAKER_01: just not done.
27:22
SPEAKER_01: And so,
27:22
SPEAKER_01: you know,
27:23
SPEAKER_01: the original impetus,
27:24
SPEAKER_01: I think,
27:24
SPEAKER_01: between MSDN in the 90s was this subscription service.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: And you got
27:29
SPEAKER_01: Every quarter, every month, you got the CD.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you got a lot of CDs.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: I remember it was, you know, 50 CDs sometimes.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: You know, it would have all the updated applications.
27:39
So it would have all the Microsoft operating systems,
27:41
databases,
27:43
developer tools...
27:44
SPEAKER_01: I think even office at one point was included.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: More and more things came into it.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: And then you had like tons and tons of CDs with the documentation.
27:50
SPEAKER_01: And so you could kind of install it and then you could search and,
27:54
SPEAKER_01: um,
27:54
SPEAKER_01: you know,
27:55
SPEAKER_01: that coupled with IntelliSense,
27:57
SPEAKER_01: which is,
27:58
SPEAKER_01: or,
27:58
SPEAKER_01: or,
27:58
SPEAKER_01: you know,
27:58
SPEAKER_01: statement completion,
28:00
SPEAKER_01: which is another thing that I think a lot of people take for granted now.
28:03
And then the other thing that I think we also take for granted
28:05
is,
28:05
is debuggers.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: Um,
28:08
SPEAKER_01: I remember when I was in university,
28:10
the debugging experience was often print F statements or a
28:16
command line debugger
28:17
SPEAKER_01: that was very rudimentary.
28:19
You could kind of dump your symbols or registers,
28:25
but it wasn't like debugging today.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: And so as a result, the MSDN was for a different time, I guess.
28:31
SPEAKER_01: It's a little quaint, but it evolved over time.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: And part of it also became this notion of a subscription service where
28:37
SPEAKER_01: your apps were always up to date.
28:39
And so I think at some point the documentation just turned on
28:42
to be on the
28:43
SPEAKER_01: internet,
28:44
SPEAKER_01: but the notion of the apps was still.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: But I think one of my takeaways is that when I think back,
28:49
SPEAKER_00: like I was at a startup,
28:51
SPEAKER_00: like a small company,
28:52
SPEAKER_00: 50% company,
28:53
SPEAKER_00: it was actually in Hungary.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have that much.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: like revenue or income compared to the US.
28:59
And my employer still paid that $1,000 or $2,000 per developer
29:04
per year because the
29:06
SPEAKER_00: developers were so much more productive using this whole Microsoft stack.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: And I know things have changed,
29:12
SPEAKER_00: but to me,
29:13
SPEAKER_00: that point in time is a bit of a reminder that there is a big premium
29:17
on just being so much more productive than anything else
29:19
because back then you know
29:20
everything was already together i think we take these days it's
29:23
it's so like
29:24
everything that we're amazed about having documentation of
29:26
working debugger you
29:28
know like software that you can use for free like for database
29:31
software like that
29:32
SPEAKER_00: was sql server back then
29:34
SPEAKER_00: But it was all there.
29:34
And I wonder if we'll move this notion that a company that
29:38
everything's so much
29:39
SPEAKER_00: better and built an ecosystem that just worked,
29:42
SPEAKER_00: it was really valuable.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: It probably applies today as well.
29:45
Maybe not in a multi-thousand dollar subscription,
29:48
but something is there.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: I just vividly remember how no one forced anyone to use Microsoft.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: And it was not about Microsoft.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: It was just about there was this thing.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: We're working faster,
29:59
SPEAKER_00: especially when we were building either the first websites,
30:02
SPEAKER_00: because ASP.NET was still
30:03
There was a point where 25% of all sites were ASP.NET based on
30:07
various things.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: After launch, it just went up on this thing.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Do you have theories on why that was?
30:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, ASP.NET was your baby a little bit.
30:17
SPEAKER_01: Well,
30:17
SPEAKER_01: I think the general thing,
30:18
SPEAKER_01: I think it's true for pretty much every field,
30:22
SPEAKER_01: in fact,
30:23
SPEAKER_01: when it comes to technology,
30:24
SPEAKER_01: is people like things that make them more productive and
30:29
SPEAKER_01: let them do more faster, cheaper.
30:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:32
SPEAKER_01: I think it's,
30:33
SPEAKER_01: it's always worth reflecting because like on just,
30:37
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:38
SPEAKER_01: imagine 10 or 15 years ago,
30:39
SPEAKER_01: what the world looked like.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: You know,
30:41
SPEAKER_01: if you were going to an event like this,
30:42
SPEAKER_01: you would either rent a car or,
30:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:46
SPEAKER_01: you'd stand in line for a long taxi and whether it gets you there,
30:49
SPEAKER_01: whether you get ripped off,
30:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:50
SPEAKER_01: now you have Uber or Lyft,
30:52
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:53
SPEAKER_01: similarly coffee.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: Um,
30:57
SPEAKER_01: or a coffee maker,
30:58
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:58
SPEAKER_01: you'd go and find a store and try eight of them and you'd search a job.
31:02
You know,
31:02
now you can order on Amazon and it'll show up same day or next
31:05
day delivery.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: And so,
31:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:06
I do think we kind of overlook the productivity that's changed
31:11
in just 10 years on
31:12
SPEAKER_01: a regular basis.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: It's not baseline, right?
31:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: When you step back and think about what the world looked like back then,
31:18
SPEAKER_01: even five or 10 years ago,
31:19
SPEAKER_01: it's completely different.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's going to be very much true for AI.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: And when we look at
31:26
the kind of productivity that something like GitHub Copilot has
31:29
or other AI systems
31:32
SPEAKER_01: tools provide,
31:34
it's going to be like that printf and the debugger kind of
31:38
story I told earlier,
31:39
SPEAKER_01: or it's going to be also kind of a quantum leap in terms of productivity.
31:44
And at the end of the day,
31:45
if you're getting more productive and saving time,
31:49
SPEAKER_01: you know, companies and developers are willing to pay for it.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: If the developer can make more money because they're using those tools.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: We see from the past, like very hard money.
31:58
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32:36
SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to touch briefly on Windows Phone.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: I was a Windows Phone developer.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: In fact,
32:43
I think that's where we connected on one of the events when
32:45
Microsoft was about to
32:47
SPEAKER_00: launch Windows Phone.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: There was a pre-launch event.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: And to this date,
32:50
SPEAKER_00: when people ask me what I think about developing on iOS,
32:53
SPEAKER_00: developing on Android,
32:53
SPEAKER_00: I tell them,
32:55
SPEAKER_00: the best development experience I've had was on Windows Phone.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: So Windows Phone,
33:01
SPEAKER_00: many listeners will have not used it for obvious reasons,
33:04
SPEAKER_00: but I was a huge fan,
33:06
SPEAKER_00: again,
33:06
SPEAKER_00: not because of Microsoft or anything,
33:08
SPEAKER_00: but it had some really forward-looking features like Live Tiles,
33:11
SPEAKER_00: which...
33:12
SPEAKER_00: are now kind of a given everywhere, but it was years ahead of it.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: And the development experience was so smooth.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: We had that first-class debugger, we had the simulator that just worked.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: And in the end,
33:22
SPEAKER_00: Windows Phone is now history,
33:23
SPEAKER_00: but you were there when Windows Phone was born,
33:27
SPEAKER_00: throughout its rise,
33:28
SPEAKER_00: and then in the end when Microsoft decided to discontinue it.
33:31
What are some learnings that you have on building platforms and
33:35
delighting
33:35
SPEAKER_00: developers and what works and what doesn't?
33:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there was some great tools.
33:41
I ran the Windows Phone development tool team at one point,
33:45
amongst other things.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: So I was involved in the developer tool side for Windows Phone.
33:50
I didn't work on the Windows Phone team itself,
33:52
but we kind of took .NET and C Sharp and
33:56
SPEAKER_01: Silverlight technology and XAML and Visual Studio.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: And I think,
34:01
SPEAKER_01: to your point,
34:02
SPEAKER_01: I think we had some really great tools that were pretty differentiated.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: The tools were really good.
34:06
I think that if there were two or three lessons from Windows
34:10
Phone for me,
34:11
SPEAKER_01: at least from a development perspective,
34:12
SPEAKER_01: I think one was,
34:13
SPEAKER_01: which is true,
34:14
SPEAKER_01: I think,
34:15
SPEAKER_01: in technology in general,
34:17
SPEAKER_01: which is
34:19
SPEAKER_01: If you're not number one,
34:20
you've got to be number two because it's really hard to be
34:25
number three and number
34:26
SPEAKER_01: four in the market and ever catch up.
34:29
SPEAKER_01: And so in some ways,
34:30
the Windows Phone project started after the iPhone was released
34:35
or the modern
34:36
SPEAKER_01: Windows Phone that you like.
34:38
And I think Windows Phone would have had a shot other than
34:41
Android came out.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: and came out beforehand a short amount of time.
34:45
And yeah,
34:46
I think it was really a question of whether Android or Windows
34:49
Phone was gonna be the
34:52
SPEAKER_01: the number two in the market.
34:53
And I think if we'd been a year earlier,
34:56
maybe it would have turned out differently.
34:58
I think the other thing is the need to kind of connect with
35:03
developers broadly.
35:06
And that means we supported Windows Phone Windows as a
35:10
development experience,
35:12
SPEAKER_01: but it didn't work on the Mac.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: And if you think about to 2009,
35:16
SPEAKER_01: 2010,
35:16
SPEAKER_01: if you went to a developer conference,
35:19
SPEAKER_01: a huge number of people were using Macs.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: They're using open source.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: And so basically saying,
35:26
SPEAKER_01: okay,
35:26
you got to install Windows on your Mac and use it in order to
35:30
build an app was a
35:31
SPEAKER_01: huge issue.
35:33
SPEAKER_01: And then I think also at that time,
35:35
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:36
SPEAKER_01: designers were exclusively Mac and to some extent today,
35:39
SPEAKER_00: they still are,
35:40
SPEAKER_01: but,
35:41
SPEAKER_01: um,
35:41
SPEAKER_01: and so,
35:41
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:41
SPEAKER_01: that,
35:42
SPEAKER_01: that combination was also headwind.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: Um,
35:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:46
SPEAKER_01: and,
35:46
SPEAKER_01: and,
35:46
SPEAKER_01: and that combination I think was,
35:48
SPEAKER_01: was the reason why ultimately it didn't get the escape velocity.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: And that's, that's why I think speed matters in platform shifts.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: And that was true for windows.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: That was true.
35:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, even the context of Azure, when we,
36:02
SPEAKER_01: first launched Azure,
36:03
SPEAKER_01: I think we were number seven in the market on cloud providers,
36:06
SPEAKER_01: and thankfully we were able to become number two.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
36:08
SPEAKER_00: and let's talk about Azure,
36:09
SPEAKER_00: because after Windows Phone,
36:12
SPEAKER_00: maybe even during Windows Phone,
36:15
SPEAKER_00: as I understand,
36:15
SPEAKER_00: you were a big part of the Azure,
36:18
SPEAKER_00: even creating Azure.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: How did Azure start?
36:20
And how,
36:20
especially,
36:21
I think we just need to remind ourselves that this was back
36:23
then where
36:24
SPEAKER_00: Windows was everywhere.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: The internet was just, I guess, starting up.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: Some visionaries might have seen it,
36:29
SPEAKER_00: but it was not that obvious that it will be as big as it would be.
36:32
Microsoft was making so much money from Windows licenses and
36:35
selling developer tools.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: CDs were arriving on the mail.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: And then there was some big investment,
36:42
SPEAKER_00: lots of people starting to work on this thing called Azure,
36:44
SPEAKER_00: which now we know it's big,
36:46
SPEAKER_00: but back then it wasn't.
36:47
What was your conviction and how did this whole project get off
36:50
the ground?
36:51
SPEAKER_00: Especially as you said, you were number seven when you started.
36:54
Well,
36:54
you know,
36:55
I think we introduced Azure to the world in the 2008 PDC.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of the equivalent of build.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: So in 2008, and I think it went general availability in 2010.
37:06
SPEAKER_01: So the 2008 was kind of a preview.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, back then in 2010, cloud was still very new.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Amazon was the leader.
37:15
But there were lots of,
37:16
I call it hosting companies,
37:17
you know,
37:18
Rackspace and
37:20
and a whole bunch of companies that probably are less familiar
37:24
name wise today that
37:27
SPEAKER_01: different companies had cloud solutions,
37:30
SPEAKER_01: but they're really kind of more hosting solutions.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: And Azure did have,
37:36
SPEAKER_01: when it came out,
37:37
SPEAKER_01: it pioneered this idea of platform as a service,
37:40
SPEAKER_01: meaning kind of some higher level services that made it easier
37:43
SPEAKER_01: for developers to build solutions.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: But,
37:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
37:47
SPEAKER_01: I would say the platform is,
37:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
37:49
SPEAKER_01: it had some usability issues in that timeframe.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: And it also did not support Linux or open source at all.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: And the tooling was not great.
38:01
SPEAKER_01: And,
38:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
38:02
SPEAKER_01: I'd say by 2010,
38:02
SPEAKER_01: when it went general availability,
38:04
SPEAKER_01: it wasn't doing super well in the market.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: And I think we were like number seven or number eight or number six.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: I can't remember what it was.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: But beginning in 2011, I think Satya...
38:13
SPEAKER_01: took over what was in the server and tools business where Azure lived.
38:17
SPEAKER_01: And I think it was about three or four weeks later,
38:20
SPEAKER_01: two or three weeks later,
38:21
SPEAKER_01: you kind of wandered into my office and said,
38:24
SPEAKER_01: hey,
38:25
SPEAKER_01: how would you like to work on Azure?
38:27
SPEAKER_01: And at the time I was in the developer division
38:30
SPEAKER_01: For some reason, I said yes.
38:34
At the time,
38:35
a lot of people emailed me and they're like,
38:36
what are you doing?
38:37
SPEAKER_01: This is career suicide.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: This is not going to go anywhere.
38:42
After we announced it,
38:44
I got lots of mail from people telling me I'd made a huge
38:46
mistake.
38:47
There was a brief moment I was like,
38:48
well,
38:48
maybe I made a mistake,
38:49
I don't know.
38:50
But this idea of having kind of this cloud-based computer that
38:54
you could build
38:55
SPEAKER_01: platform,
38:56
build solutions on top of and run them at scale and
38:59
dramatically change the curve
39:00
SPEAKER_01: of productivity
39:03
SPEAKER_01: as well as success for startups and small companies and big companies,
39:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
39:10
SPEAKER_01: it was enticing.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, I think I started in 2011.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: You know,
39:15
one of the first things we did that's kind of gone down in lore
39:19
was I kind of
39:20
SPEAKER_01: worked on the project for maybe 60 days,
39:22
SPEAKER_01: played with the product a lot,
39:23
SPEAKER_01: and said,
39:24
SPEAKER_01: gosh,
39:24
SPEAKER_01: we have a lot of things to fix.
39:27
And so we had sort of this off-site where we brought together
39:31
all the senior
39:31
SPEAKER_01: leaders and architects into a room.
39:34
And I went to Safeway and bought these sort of Visa credit
39:39
cards that were like
39:40
SPEAKER_01: prepaid and gave one to each table.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: And we mixed the teams up and we said, you're going to build an app.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: And we have two days to build an app together, starting with signing up.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, half the people couldn't figure out how to sign up.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: And
39:53
SPEAKER_01: You know, half the people struggled to get the tools installed.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: The documentation was out of date.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: It didn't work.
39:59
And,
39:59
you know,
40:00
the idea was just,
40:01
you know,
40:01
can you build a Hello World app?
40:02
SPEAKER_01: And it was an eye opener,
40:04
SPEAKER_01: I think,
40:05
SPEAKER_01: to a lot of people of like,
40:06
SPEAKER_01: oh,
40:07
SPEAKER_01: I thought my part was great,
40:08
SPEAKER_01: but no one can use it.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we used that offsite at the end.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: I kind of went to the whiteboard and said, okay.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: Let's list all the things we need to fix over the next year.
40:17
SPEAKER_01: And we kind of created a punch list.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: Just starting as a new user who wants to.
40:22
SPEAKER_01: Starting with a website and sign up, start with documentation.
40:25
SPEAKER_01: Let's start with the developer tools.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: You know, hey, we probably need to support open source.
40:30
Yeah,
40:30
we created this punch list and 12 months later,
40:33
we relaunched Azure in 2012.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: Started to get some good traction.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: And as part of that, we also supported Linux.
40:40
SPEAKER_01: We supported VMs.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: That was a huge change.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: I still remember.
40:44
SPEAKER_01: Which we didn't do.
40:45
SPEAKER_01: And then in 2014, we renamed Azure to be Microsoft Azure.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: Back then, before that, it was Windows Azure.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: And then as part of that,
40:53
we also very much focused on businesses because we realized
40:59
Amazon really owned the
41:01
SPEAKER_01: consumer startup space,
41:03
SPEAKER_01: which was the biggest market in cloud at that time.
41:07
And I think one of the things that was part of my lessons from
41:10
watching the Windows
41:11
Phone project was if you simply try to do exactly what your
41:14
competitor does and
41:15
SPEAKER_01: they're ahead of you,
41:15
SPEAKER_01: it's hard to catch up.
41:17
Pick something,
41:18
pick a beachhead that is small enough to win,
41:22
big enough to matter.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: And we sort of said, let's be the cloud for modern business.
41:25
SPEAKER_01: It was kind of the tagline.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: It was a hybrid,
41:28
SPEAKER_01: take advantage of cloud,
41:29
SPEAKER_01: use cloud,
41:30
SPEAKER_01: connect to the existing enterprise you already have.
41:33
SPEAKER_01: And we were able to kind of build differentiation in Azure
41:36
that went after a segment that was still pretty small at the
41:40
time and Amazon wasn't great at.
41:42
And that was the key thing that kind of took us from like
41:45
number seven to number
41:46
SPEAKER_01: two was people said,
41:47
SPEAKER_01: okay,
41:49
SPEAKER_01: I get why I might use Amazon and Azure.
41:52
And it helped us get some of that escape velocity and put us in
41:56
second place.
41:57
SPEAKER_01: And then we've kind of grown every year since then.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: And now we have done,
42:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
42:01
SPEAKER_01: it's ChatGPT and we have lots of other- Yeah,
42:03
SPEAKER_00: now we're going head on hatch.
42:03
But it helped us in 2014 to 2016 or 17 that we were kind of
42:05
great in hybrid cloud
42:11
SPEAKER_01: And Amazon kind of didn't want to go after that space.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, that really helped us accelerate and become relevant.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: And this is probably a good lesson for even like startups,
42:20
SPEAKER_00: small startups who are in a very crowded space,
42:22
SPEAKER_00: let's say with AI,
42:23
SPEAKER_00: like,
42:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
42:24
SPEAKER_00: look at the places that might be a bit more opportunity.
42:27
If you can find an underserved market where people are
42:31
desperate for a solution,
42:33
That's a great place whether you're a startup or you're an
42:35
established company to
42:36
SPEAKER_01: kind of build a new product.
42:38
If all you're doing is building the same thing that your
42:41
competitor's doing,
42:42
SPEAKER_01: but you're coming out later without as much share,
42:44
SPEAKER_01: It's really, really hard, the history of computing, to catch up.
42:47
So you mentioned open source,
42:48
and a big shift in the 2010s was open source.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: Microsoft did have a bit of a,
42:53
SPEAKER_00: felt to me,
42:53
SPEAKER_00: a half-hearted attempt with something called CodePlex.
42:56
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people will not remember it.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: It was basically like, hey, host your stuff on CodePlex.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: You can choose your license, or you can opt for your license.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: But most projects were like non-permissive licenses.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: You could see the source code, but the license was...
43:09
SPEAKER_00: It's just not there.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: And then something happened.
43:11
SPEAKER_00: So the weird thing was that Microsoft did have this solution,
43:13
SPEAKER_00: CodePlex,
43:14
SPEAKER_00: and it was popular with Microsoft.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: One of my old companies used it.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: And then Microsoft started to just like first embrace GitHub.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, there was a acquisition of GitHub.
43:22
But even before,
43:23
I think Microsoft already started to do a lot more permissive
43:27
open source.
43:27
I think the Ajax toolkit might have been one of the first ones
43:30
to go out there.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: What happened then?
43:33
SPEAKER_00: Was this coming internally from below?
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Was it leaders like yourself saying,
43:37
SPEAKER_00: all right,
43:38
SPEAKER_00: we should just be a lot more serious about open source,
43:42
SPEAKER_00: like proper open source?
43:44
Yeah,
43:44
I think it was very much a cultural shift in the company and
43:50
also a business model shift.
43:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
43:52
SPEAKER_01: I think ultimately there was philosophical things about open source,
43:55
but I think a lot of Microsoft's early hesitation around open
43:59
source was really
44:00
SPEAKER_01: around business model.
44:02
And I think it's true today even if you look at any company and
44:05
what they're doing,
44:07
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:07
SPEAKER_01: start with what is their business model.
44:09
SPEAKER_01: And often what they do is driven by the business model.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: And so if you are social media,
44:16
SPEAKER_01: you care a lot about advertising because that is your business model.
44:19
And so when you think about privacy or you think about data
44:23
protection,
44:24
you know,
44:26
SPEAKER_01: your position on that matters a lot as to whether you could monetize and,
44:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:31
SPEAKER_01: pay the rent.
44:32
SPEAKER_01: And,
44:33
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:33
SPEAKER_01: similarly,
44:33
SPEAKER_01: I think if you are a hardware company,
44:37
SPEAKER_01: you care a lot about the hardware and your,
44:39
SPEAKER_01: your business model is really around selling the hardware.
44:41
SPEAKER_01: And so you care about, you know, a different set of things.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: And,
44:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:44
we were at the time in the early nineties or the late nineties
44:47
and in early two
44:48
SPEAKER_01: thousands,
44:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:49
SPEAKER_01: most of our money came from commercial software licenses,
44:53
SPEAKER_01: um,
44:53
SPEAKER_01: And so the idea that like you could buy one copy and give it to everyone,
44:56
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:57
SPEAKER_01: for free,
44:58
SPEAKER_01: for free was kind of a scary thing at that time.
45:01
SPEAKER_01: And so,
45:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:01
SPEAKER_01: I think,
45:02
SPEAKER_01: so part of it,
45:02
SPEAKER_01: part of our kind of concern around open source was really grounded,
45:06
SPEAKER_01: frankly,
45:06
SPEAKER_01: in business model.
45:07
And then I think there was also kind of a misunderstanding of
45:09
what is open source.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: And,
45:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:12
SPEAKER_01: back then there was sort of GPL and,
45:14
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:15
SPEAKER_01: if you checked in one line of code,
45:16
SPEAKER_01: would it,
45:17
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:17
SPEAKER_01: the license mean that like you just gave away all your IP?
45:21
And so there was still in those early days,
45:23
there was a little bit of misunderstanding.
45:26
SPEAKER_01: It was before,
45:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:27
GPL kind of modified the license a little bit and clarified a
45:31
little bit what it
45:31
SPEAKER_01: meant.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: But I think there was also some fear, uncertainty and doubt.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: that a lot of companies, not just Microsoft, kind of had around it.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, that was the 90s.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: I think what changed in the late 90s,
45:43
SPEAKER_01: and I probably played a big role in this,
45:45
SPEAKER_01: was just recognizing,
45:47
SPEAKER_01: but if you're a new developer trying to say you need to pay us money for
45:51
SPEAKER_01: everything,
45:52
SPEAKER_01: whereas something else,
45:53
SPEAKER_01: and that you can't see the code,
45:54
SPEAKER_01: you can't help contribute to the code,
45:56
SPEAKER_01: you can't participate in the development,
45:58
SPEAKER_01: you know, you're swimming against the tide.
46:00
SPEAKER_01: And,
46:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
46:02
SPEAKER_01: at the end of the day,
46:02
SPEAKER_01: if you are a new or an old developer in that timeframe,
46:07
SPEAKER_01: you kind of want to be able to see the code.
46:08
SPEAKER_01: You want to be able to contribute.
46:11
SPEAKER_01: And so,
46:12
SPEAKER_01: you know,
46:12
SPEAKER_01: we took some early steps and it was a little bit,
46:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
46:17
SPEAKER_01: as you mentioned,
46:18
SPEAKER_01: the Ajax toolkit,
46:19
SPEAKER_01: I think was the first thing we open source.
46:21
SPEAKER_00: I think it was.
46:22
SPEAKER_00: I talked to some folks at Microsoft, so.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: And I remember another big step we did was we added jQuery,
46:27
SPEAKER_01: going back memory lane,
46:30
SPEAKER_01: which was at the time one of the most popular.
46:33
I think actually prototype was the most popular and jQuery was
46:35
the up and coming
46:36
SPEAKER_01: because it was really streamlined.
46:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it overtook it in the old time.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: It overtook it.
46:39
SPEAKER_01: But we kind of added it into the ASP.NET template inside Visual Studio.
46:44
SPEAKER_01: And that was also considered groundbreaking at the time.
46:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
46:46
SPEAKER_01: in hindsight,
46:46
SPEAKER_01: this all sounds trite,
46:48
SPEAKER_01: I guess,
46:48
but at the time it was a big thing because suddenly we were
46:50
taking licenses,
46:51
SPEAKER_01: I think it was both like MIT or BSD license and incorporating it into our
46:55
SPEAKER_01: commercial product.
46:56
And it was,
46:57
you know,
46:57
it was a bit of a,
46:58
we crossed a bridge or a Rubicon.
47:00
And people said,
47:00
okay,
47:01
I guess the sky didn't fall in and maybe we could do more.
47:05
And so,
47:05
you know,
47:06
it was a bit of a journey to kind of take the company through
47:09
it.
47:09
SPEAKER_01: But probably my team in particular helped a lot with that.
47:13
And then the other thing that really changed in the kind of
47:16
early 2000s or the
47:16
SPEAKER_01: 2010,
47:16
SPEAKER_01: 2011,
47:18
2012 was just recognizing that also...
47:22
SPEAKER_01: In the cloud world,
47:23
you could be very successful if all your customers only use
47:26
Linux and open source
47:27
SPEAKER_01: because the business model did also change.
47:30
SPEAKER_00: And now people are paying for compute,
47:31
SPEAKER_00: for resources,
47:32
SPEAKER_00: for services,
47:33
SPEAKER_00: for all the abstractions if you needed.
47:37
And we also then recognized at the time that if you didn't
47:39
really have developers'
47:43
SPEAKER_01: hearts and minds...
47:44
They weren't going to pay any attention to the cloud platform
47:47
you put out or the
47:48
SPEAKER_01: tools you put out or the databases you put out.
47:50
And so we kind of went through this shift over a couple of
47:53
years where I think both
47:54
SPEAKER_01: culturally,
47:55
SPEAKER_01: we kind of brought the company along of like,
47:57
SPEAKER_01: hey,
47:57
SPEAKER_01: this is not scary.
47:58
SPEAKER_01: This is good.
47:59
And then also business model wise,
48:00
we had permission to kind of experiment and take risks.
48:04
where you could say,
48:04
okay,
48:05
let's make it free or let's make it open source.
48:07
SPEAKER_00: Which leads us into Visual Studio Code.
48:10
SPEAKER_00: In 2015,
48:10
SPEAKER_00: if you would have asked me what is unlikely to happen,
48:13
SPEAKER_00: I would have said that people use more of Microsoft's IDE,
48:17
SPEAKER_00: which was Visual Studio.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: Again, you still had to pay a bunch of money.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: It was amazing.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: I came from that world.
48:21
But when I moved to new companies,
48:22
they were like,
48:23
let's use open source stuff.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: Let's use free stuff.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: We use Atom or Sublime,
48:27
SPEAKER_00: or maybe we might have paid for JetBrains,
48:30
SPEAKER_00: but people usually like to just...
48:32
SPEAKER_00: you know, use a worse experience, but it was open source hackable.
48:35
SPEAKER_00: And then out of seemingly nowhere,
48:37
SPEAKER_00: VS Code came out,
48:38
SPEAKER_00: which is,
48:39
SPEAKER_00: it's free to use,
48:40
SPEAKER_00: you know,
48:40
SPEAKER_00: there's no like tricky things around it.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: And it just felt,
48:44
SPEAKER_00: again,
48:45
SPEAKER_00: a bit incredible to me,
48:46
because just knowing how Microsoft used to base their all
48:50
developer business on pay
48:51
SPEAKER_00: for quality tools,
48:53
SPEAKER_00: it just seemed impossible.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: How did that happen inside?
48:55
SPEAKER_00: And what was the thinking?
48:56
SPEAKER_00: And now, of course, most developers use VS Code or a fork of VS Code.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I'd been out of the developer division when I took over Azure.
49:03
SPEAKER_01: So from 2011 to say 2014, I hadn't been in the developer division.
49:10
SPEAKER_01: I'd been focused on Azure.
49:11
And then when Satya took over as CEO in 2014,
49:15
the same day I kind of took over his old job.
49:18
SPEAKER_01: And that included DevDiv.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:21
SPEAKER_01: And so that kind of came back into my world.
49:25
And I think one of the things that we did in the early days of
49:29
2014 was I kind of
49:31
SPEAKER_01: just looked around and said,
49:33
I think we have an opportunity to make a couple of choices that
49:37
will be bold and
49:38
SPEAKER_01: aggressive.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: that give us a shot to rewind relevance with developers of the world.
49:44
And if we don't,
49:45
we're going to be on an iceberg that's going to slowly melt.
49:48
SPEAKER_01: And at some point we're going to be swimming.
49:51
SPEAKER_01: And so,
49:51
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:52
SPEAKER_01: we kind of had a set of meetings in,
49:55
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:55
SPEAKER_01: in spring of 2014 and kind of wrote on the whiteboard,
49:59
SPEAKER_01: let's,
49:59
SPEAKER_01: let's be bold and came up with kind of three big things that we said,
50:03
SPEAKER_01: okay,
50:04
SPEAKER_01: let's,
50:06
SPEAKER_01: What can we do to become more relevant?
50:09
The first one was we actually introduced a community edition of
50:13
Visual Studio.
50:14
SPEAKER_01: So previously,
50:15
if you wanted to use Visual Studio and take advantage of the
50:19
features that
50:20
SPEAKER_01: developers loved,
50:21
SPEAKER_01: You had to pay a minimum of about $1,000 to do it.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: And we said, okay, let's make it free.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: And it was scary for a lot of people at the time.
50:30
SPEAKER_01: But we said,
50:30
SPEAKER_01: look,
50:31
SPEAKER_01: we can make it for small projects,
50:32
SPEAKER_01: for startups,
50:34
SPEAKER_01: for independent developers that want to build something.
50:38
SPEAKER_01: And let's make the full feature set available.
50:41
SPEAKER_01: And so that was decision number one.
50:45
SPEAKER_01: And decision number two is let's open source.net.
50:50
SPEAKER_01: And let's make it cross platform.
50:51
SPEAKER_01: With Mono.
50:52
SPEAKER_01: And it was less with Mono.
50:54
SPEAKER_01: We actually took our base library.
50:57
SPEAKER_00: Oh, sorry.
50:57
SPEAKER_00: Mono was before.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: Mono was before.
50:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: Because there's no alternative.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: And now there's no need for Mono.
51:03
SPEAKER_01: And then we said, let's open source it and do it right.
51:06
SPEAKER_01: Not meaning just open source where we can contribute code.
51:10
SPEAKER_01: But like, no, true open source.
51:11
SPEAKER_01: We want the community to contribute code.
51:14
SPEAKER_01: And do it under the right license and put it on GitHub.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: And that was big decision number two.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: And have a great Linux and Mac port and make them first class.
51:27
SPEAKER_01: That was kind of decision number two.
51:29
SPEAKER_01: And then decision number three was...
51:31
SPEAKER_01: As much as we love Visual Studio,
51:33
SPEAKER_01: the IDE,
51:34
let's also recognize increasingly web developers and those that
51:38
are not using a
51:39
compiled language are looking for something that's much more of
51:41
a lightweight code
51:42
SPEAKER_01: optimized editor.
51:44
SPEAKER_01: And there was a great project that had been started.
51:49
It was basically a web-based editor written in Node,
51:53
written in TypeScript.
51:56
SPEAKER_01: But you ran it in a VS Online, I think is what we called it.
52:00
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, VS Online, yes.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: And it was great technology, but...
52:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
52:05
at the time people weren't really looking to write code in a
52:08
browser and people
52:09
SPEAKER_01: would say,
52:09
SPEAKER_01: well,
52:10
SPEAKER_01: it's a great,
52:10
SPEAKER_01: it's great if I want to edit five or six lines of code,
52:12
SPEAKER_01: but like,
52:13
SPEAKER_01: it's not a,
52:13
SPEAKER_01: you know,
52:14
SPEAKER_01: it doesn't have a debugger.
52:15
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't have Intel sense.
52:16
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't, you know, it wouldn't scale for a large project.
52:19
SPEAKER_01: And,
52:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
52:20
SPEAKER_01: we said,
52:20
SPEAKER_01: what,
52:21
SPEAKER_01: what if,
52:21
SPEAKER_01: you know,
52:21
SPEAKER_01: I think I kind of said,
52:22
SPEAKER_01: why don't you take this?
52:23
SPEAKER_01: And is there a way that you could package it up in a,
52:26
SPEAKER_01: you know,
52:27
SPEAKER_01: Mac and windows and Linux version?
52:30
SPEAKER_01: you know, shell and add file system support.
52:33
And why don't we take this open source debugger we're about to
52:35
do in .NET and port
52:37
SPEAKER_01: it and make it work with it and really,
52:40
SPEAKER_01: you know,
52:41
don't have a project system was kind of one of the mantras and
52:44
really focus on
52:46
SPEAKER_01: streamlining editing and let's make it open source.
52:51
SPEAKER_01: And the three different decisions we made,
52:54
SPEAKER_01: and we kind of made all those decisions,
52:56
SPEAKER_01: I think in about an hour and a half.
52:58
SPEAKER_01: So it was a good meeting.
52:59
SPEAKER_01: That was a good one.
53:01
And honestly,
53:02
if you asked like,
53:03
what was the risk probability of each one succeeding?
53:06
SPEAKER_01: I thought the first one,
53:07
SPEAKER_01: which is making the tools free,
53:09
SPEAKER_01: was gonna definitely drive more developer usage.
53:12
SPEAKER_01: And whether it was gonna destroy the Visual Studio revenue, I don't know.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: But I said like, let's take that risk.
53:16
SPEAKER_01: I think the .NET being open source, I thought it would help.
53:19
SPEAKER_01: And it certainly did.
53:20
SPEAKER_01: And then the VS Code one was the most,
53:24
SPEAKER_01: I would say,
53:26
SPEAKER_01: speculative,
53:27
SPEAKER_01: where I thought,
53:27
SPEAKER_01: like,
53:28
SPEAKER_01: I think this could help,
53:30
SPEAKER_01: but I don't know.
53:31
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of other editors out there.
53:32
There was Atom,
53:33
there was Sublime,
53:34
there was,
53:36
gosh,
53:36
a couple other ones that were only Mac.
53:38
SPEAKER_00: And then later new ones are like NeoVim, etc. ?
53:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
53:40
SPEAKER_01: and so,
53:41
SPEAKER_01: you know,
53:41
SPEAKER_01: it was,
53:41
SPEAKER_01: but it was,
53:42
SPEAKER_01: you know,
53:43
SPEAKER_01: of the three decisions,
53:44
SPEAKER_01: they were all very big.
53:45
I think the ones that we remember the most would be VS Code and
53:48
then the open sourcing of .NET.
53:49
SPEAKER_01: And ironically,
53:50
the one that I thought would have the biggest impact was
53:52
probably the one that had
53:52
SPEAKER_01: the least impact,
53:53
SPEAKER_01: although it helped a tremendous amount.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it comes to tell you, you can never know even from the inside.
53:59
But,
53:59
you know,
54:00
basically,
54:01
I think later in that year,
54:02
we kind of launched,
54:03
announced all three.
54:03
SPEAKER_01: And,
54:04
SPEAKER_01: you know,
54:05
SPEAKER_01: that really,
54:05
SPEAKER_01: I think,
54:05
SPEAKER_01: helped us with our next kind of,
54:07
SPEAKER_01: I'll call it rejuvenation with the developer community.
54:10
SPEAKER_01: And in some ways also the VS Code,
54:13
SPEAKER_01: I remember doing events in 2015,
54:17
SPEAKER_01: 2016 with a lot of the GitHub team,
54:21
SPEAKER_01: which was an independent company.
54:23
SPEAKER_01: And VS Code also was that bridge that I think earned us the credibility
54:28
SPEAKER_01: to talk to GitHub and to be sort of in the developer community at large.
54:35
SPEAKER_01: And,
54:36
SPEAKER_01: um,
54:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
54:36
SPEAKER_01: it was,
54:37
SPEAKER_01: was,
54:37
was the bridge that kind of started the conversation around
54:40
ultimately GitHub
54:41
SPEAKER_01: becoming part of Microsoft,
54:43
SPEAKER_01: um,
54:43
SPEAKER_01: which,
54:43
SPEAKER_01: you know,
54:43
SPEAKER_01: if you,
54:44
SPEAKER_01: if you went back to 2010,
54:45
SPEAKER_00: it was impossible.
54:48
SPEAKER_01: It would be the most crazy solution suggestion ever.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: And then frankly,
54:52
I think it beyond the fact that the GitHub team wouldn't want
54:54
to have been bought.
54:56
SPEAKER_01: Um,
54:56
or be part of Microsoft,
54:57
I think the developer community would have left immediately.
55:00
And,
55:01
and yet we,
55:02
you know,
55:02
fast forward to 2017,
55:04
I think was when we did the acquisition.
55:05
SPEAKER_01: People still had some concern,
55:07
SPEAKER_01: but they said,
55:07
SPEAKER_01: no,
55:07
SPEAKER_01: let's tell you what,
55:08
SPEAKER_01: you've earned the right,
55:09
SPEAKER_01: we're going to give you a chance.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there was a lot of skepticism as well.
55:13
SPEAKER_00: I agree.
55:14
SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
55:15
SPEAKER_00: and then now it brings us today actually to build where Copilot,
55:19
SPEAKER_00: built by the GitHub team,
55:20
we know the AI system with a bunch of advanced capabilities is
55:23
now open source as
55:25
SPEAKER_00: well,
55:25
SPEAKER_00: together with VS Code.
55:28
SPEAKER_00: So now that we're here,
55:30
SPEAKER_00: just looking ahead,
55:31
SPEAKER_00: we are where we are with lots of exciting new tools,
55:36
SPEAKER_00: lots of new ways to work,
55:37
SPEAKER_00: and I think we're going to figure out.
55:39
SPEAKER_00: Agents are the hot thing.
55:41
Personally,
55:41
what are you excited about in terms of developer tools and also
55:45
cloud?
55:47
SPEAKER_00: When you look at,
55:48
SPEAKER_00: may these be projects,
55:49
SPEAKER_00: may these be directions or things that need to be figured out?
55:52
SPEAKER_01: I think the thing I get excited most about is,
55:55
SPEAKER_01: certainly on the developer tool side,
55:56
SPEAKER_01: I do think this notion of having an agent that works with us,
56:00
SPEAKER_01: and that's some of the demos we showed today and yesterday of,
56:03
SPEAKER_01: how can you assign an issue in GitHub to your co-pilot?
56:09
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of us have used,
56:11
SPEAKER_01: whether it's GitHub co-pilot,
56:12
SPEAKER_01: whether it's ChatGPT or N35 co-pilot or cursor,
56:17
SPEAKER_01: people are used to kind of a request response
56:20
model where you type something,
56:22
you get a response immediately,
56:23
and that's super powerful.
56:24
SPEAKER_01: So that's not going away.
56:26
But this notion as the models get richer that you can just
56:29
assign a task to
56:31
SPEAKER_01: effectively a coworker that is AI that can do something over maybe 10,
56:37
SPEAKER_01: 15,
56:41
20 minutes,
56:38
SPEAKER_01: and then assign it back to you,
56:39
SPEAKER_01: I think that is super profound.
56:41
And so the ability to say,
56:42
hey,
56:43
take this Figma or take this screenshot that I've sketched out,
56:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
56:49
SPEAKER_01: turn it into a nice HTML with CSS or,
56:52
SPEAKER_01: you know,
56:53
SPEAKER_01: create for me,
56:55
SPEAKER_01: you know,
56:55
a Kubernetes deployment file and a basic microservice
57:00
architecture that has these
57:01
five dimensions and is connected to these three resources and
57:04
make it scalable and
57:06
SPEAKER_01: secure,
57:07
SPEAKER_01: like assign it to the co-pilot,
57:09
SPEAKER_01: grab a coffee,
57:10
SPEAKER_01: come back and get something back.
57:12
SPEAKER_01: Um,
57:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that I think is really profound.
57:15
SPEAKER_01: And then how do you extend that so that in addition to development,
57:19
SPEAKER_01: a lot of kind of what you might think of as the operation tasks or SRE,
57:24
SPEAKER_01: things like,
57:24
SPEAKER_01: hey,
57:25
SPEAKER_01: is there anomaly detection in my logs?
57:27
SPEAKER_01: You know, is the performance dropping?
57:29
SPEAKER_01: Why?
57:31
SPEAKER_01: You know, can you ask it, what changed in the environment?
57:33
SPEAKER_01: What changed in the code base?
57:35
SPEAKER_01: What's changed in terms of the user behavior?
57:37
You know,
57:37
how do you have an AI agent that can kind of assist you in
57:39
that?
57:40
SPEAKER_01: I think that's really about kind of giving every developer superpowers.
57:46
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's kind of like the Marvel Iron Man.
57:49
You know,
57:49
suddenly you have a suit that gives you kind of these amazing
57:53
superpowers.
57:54
You know,
57:54
I think to some extent,
57:55
these types of copilots are going to do that.
57:56
SPEAKER_01: And then when you combine it with...
57:59
SPEAKER_01: a cloud like Azure,
58:02
where if you've got a great idea and you're going into business
58:07
as a startup or
58:08
SPEAKER_01: whether you're a big company,
58:10
SPEAKER_01: the ability to run it in 70 regions around the world.
58:15
SPEAKER_01: Certainly right now,
58:15
SPEAKER_01: when you think about whether it's tariffs or whether it's geopolitical,
58:20
SPEAKER_01: just like,
58:21
SPEAKER_00: okay,
58:21
SPEAKER_01: how do I meet every country's local residency requirements on data?
58:26
SPEAKER_01: Cloud is the way to do that.
58:28
SPEAKER_01: Similarly,
58:28
SPEAKER_01: if you think about how do you target the growing markets in the world,
58:35
SPEAKER_01: cloud is the way you do that.
58:36
SPEAKER_01: And then when you start thinking about how do I actually build my own AI
58:40
SPEAKER_01: application and take advantage of the latest models?
58:43
SPEAKER_01: How do I use diffusion or fine-tune my own model that's based on,
58:50
SPEAKER_01: say,
58:50
SPEAKER_01: my own data or do post-training?
58:52
SPEAKER_01: You know, the cloud's going to be the way you do that.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: And so I get excited in terms of when you take these sort of tools,
58:58
SPEAKER_01: you know,
58:58
SPEAKER_01: tying it back to the beginning of the conversation,
59:00
SPEAKER_01: going back to MFC and Visual Basic.
59:03
SPEAKER_01: You know,
59:03
SPEAKER_01: I think this is the same level of kind of exponential jump,
59:07
but probably even more profound in terms of the impact because
59:11
it's not just
59:11
SPEAKER_01: development,
59:12
SPEAKER_01: it's also runtime.
59:13
SPEAKER_01: And then it's that feedback loop of, okay, now I get something out there.
59:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm learning from my user behavior.
59:18
SPEAKER_01: Let me improve it.
59:19
SPEAKER_01: And,
59:20
SPEAKER_01: um,
59:20
SPEAKER_01: that's the thing that always motivates me is,
59:22
SPEAKER_01: is can you ultimately make someone more successful?
59:27
SPEAKER_01: And,
59:27
SPEAKER_01: um,
59:28
if you can allow them to take an idea and run with it faster
59:33
and do it faster,
59:35
SPEAKER_01: better,
59:35
SPEAKER_01: cheaper,
59:35
SPEAKER_01: you know,
59:36
SPEAKER_01: you can change their life and you can bring to life this great idea.
59:39
SPEAKER_01: And if you can do that at scale, it's, it's a fun journey.
59:45
SPEAKER_00: hearing about like AI colleagues can be a little scary for as engineers.
59:51
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a similarly big shift as back,
59:54
SPEAKER_00: if you think back in the nineties,
59:55
SPEAKER_00: oh,
59:55
anyone can program with like dragging and dropping and doing
59:58
similar stuff that I'm
59:59
SPEAKER_00: doing right now.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_00: What would your advice be for
1:00:02
software engineer today like you know mid-level or experienced
1:00:04
engineers who want
1:00:05
to be the you know standout engineers of tomorrow on on how to
1:00:10
approach this and
1:00:10
how to think about the fact that now they can a lot of the work
1:00:13
that they have been
1:00:14
valuable for until now can potentially be offloaded it's a
1:00:17
little bit you see what
1:00:18
i mean it kind of messes with your mind a bit it does i mean i
1:00:21
think the thing i'd
1:00:21
probably say to encourage is like i'm a big student of history
1:00:25
like technology
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: history i've been part of and i was studying sometimes but
1:00:28
I also like to look back in the last 500 years of history and
1:00:32
read lots of biographies.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_01: History is a way of repeating itself.
1:00:38
SPEAKER_01: Just going back to the development community for a while,
1:00:41
SPEAKER_01: I remember in the early 2000s,
1:00:46
people would come to developer conferences and they would
1:00:48
literally have t-shirts
1:00:49
SPEAKER_01: that said,
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: IntelliSense rots the mind.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_00: Oh.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_01: Because like no real developer.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_00: And it sounds like it was a really good autocomplete.
1:00:59
Yeah,
1:00:59
like no real developer would use autocomplete was the statement
1:01:02
at the time.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_01: Real developers knew the name of the method and the parameters.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_00: And the classes, yeah.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_01: And similarly, I think type safety, when .NET was introduced,
1:01:13
SPEAKER_01: Siebel's host developers were like, type safety is for wimps.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: All you need is a void star pointer.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_01: And if you got it wrong, you'd crash.
1:01:23
SPEAKER_01: But who needs type safety?
1:01:25
SPEAKER_01: And similarly, I think even when JavaScript emerged in HTML5,
1:01:31
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:31
SPEAKER_01: people would say like,
1:01:32
SPEAKER_01: well,
1:01:32
SPEAKER_01: you can't really have a real app with HTML and JavaScript.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_00: We had the thing, it's not a real language JavaScript.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_00: I remember this one.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_01: And so,
1:01:38
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:38
SPEAKER_01: all these parallels,
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: I kind of,
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: and then going back to,
1:01:41
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: the days of debuggers,
1:01:43
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:44
SPEAKER_01: real developers don't use debuggers or profilers.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: And so it's,
1:01:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:49
SPEAKER_01: I've heard these things before where people say,
1:01:52
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:53
SPEAKER_01: you can't,
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: and certainly with cloud,
1:01:55
SPEAKER_01: I've certainly heard lots of people say,
1:01:56
SPEAKER_01: well,
1:01:57
SPEAKER_01: I can run my private cloud cheaper and faster and better than you can.
1:02:00
It's like,
1:02:01
okay,
1:02:02
most of those companies are not in business anymore,
1:02:04
but sure,
1:02:06
go for it.
1:02:07
And so I do think that would be my only kind of history lesson
1:02:12
I'd pass on,
1:02:12
which is generally these things are frightening sometimes
1:02:16
because they do make it
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: look like,
1:02:18
SPEAKER_01: wow,
1:02:19
SPEAKER_01: could this automate me?
1:02:20
SPEAKER_01: Could this replace my job?
1:02:21
SPEAKER_01: But ultimately, if you embrace the productivity,
1:02:25
you suddenly discover you can do a lot more and you can deliver
1:02:29
a lot more.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_01: And that is really what makes you valuable.
1:02:33
It's not whether or not you know the name of the method and are
1:02:36
proud that you
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: remember the 18 parameters to it.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_01: It's, you know, what does the method do?
1:02:42
SPEAKER_01: And does the application calling the method accomplish some value?
1:02:46
And so to the extent that we can leverage AI to kind of make
1:02:49
developers more
1:02:49
SPEAKER_01: successful,
1:02:51
SPEAKER_01: I think we,
1:02:52
SPEAKER_01: in the limit,
1:02:53
SPEAKER_01: it's going to create more jobs,
1:02:54
SPEAKER_01: not less.
1:02:55
And I think ultimately it means those jobs are going to be
1:02:57
higher paying because
1:02:58
the business value you're delivering to the company or the
1:03:02
startup or your app that
1:03:05
SPEAKER_01: you're building becomes even greater.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: So it's not always a perfectly linear progression,
1:03:12
SPEAKER_01: but I think that's,
1:03:13
SPEAKER_01: if I look again back in history,
1:03:16
SPEAKER_01: garbage collection,
1:03:17
SPEAKER_01: tele-sense,
1:03:17
SPEAKER_01: debuggers,
1:03:19
SPEAKER_01: type safety,
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: even open source,
1:03:22
SPEAKER_01: those are all things that were proven right
1:03:25
SPEAKER_01: And the naysayers were proven wrong over time.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
1:03:28
SPEAKER_00: and I guess it's just good to remind that open source,
1:03:30
SPEAKER_00: I think from the outside,
1:03:31
SPEAKER_00: we would not think it's scary.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: But from the inside, like Microsoft, it was.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_00: And it turned out pretty good.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_00: It worked out pretty well.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much, Scott.
1:03:38
SPEAKER_00: This was so much fun.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_00: This was a lot of fun.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for having me.
1:03:41
Thanks to Scott for this trip down memory lane and for his
1:03:44
advice on how software
1:03:45
engineers can keep growing in an industry that changes as fast
1:03:48
as software
1:03:49
SPEAKER_00: engineering does.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_00: For more details about Microsoft's developer tools evolution,
1:03:53
check out our deep dive into Pragmatic Engineer linked in the
1:03:55
show notes below.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_00: If you've enjoyed this podcast,
1:03:57
SPEAKER_00: please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_00: A special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_00: Thanks and see you in the next one.