Richard Brody who made Microsoft Word looks back on Microsoft at the time

Richard Brody , a former Microsoft technician and later turned into a professional player of poker, talks about how he joined Microsoft on his blog, the mission at the time, the background behind Microsoft Word , and more.

Microsoft: The Early Days
http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htm

In May 1981, Mr. Brody became the 77th employee of Microsoft following Charles Simonie who was the boss of Xerox PARC. Mr. Brody's "application department" has not been independent as a department yet, and it seems that there were only two team members, Mr. Brody and Mr. Simony. Excluding these two people, Microsoft employees at that time were undertaken under the brilliant vision of Bill Gates, " Xenix " which is a type of Unix, a new OS " MS-DOS ", a traditional It seems he was working on software development.

Gates of the time.

Under such circumstances, the mission given to Mr. Brody and Mr. Simony was "to enter business markets for personal computers into emerging markets". At that time, before IBM entered the personal computer market yet, the personal computer was meant Apple Computer. When IBM entered in a year and a half later, it seems that personal computer became established as a general term called abbreviated as "PC".

Mr. Simonei's mission, Mr. Brodie's boss, was to develop software that could fight VisiCalc , the world's first spreadsheet program. Mr. Simone will produce " Microsoft Excel " which will beat BeiCalc and Lotus 1 - 2 - 3 later, but Brody wrote a program called " p code machine " important for that work It was said that.

Mr. Simoney on the left and Brodie on the right.

Mr. Simony devised a strategy called "Revenue Bomb" (income bomb). This is to list the Microsoft products on the horizontal axis and the numerous personal computers sold by many manufacturers on the vertical axis, and to devise a leak-free sales strategy. Thanks to the p code machine, which was named "CS" and developed for over 10 years by Microsoft, it seems that Microsoft could easily create software products of different versions for each machine.

At the time, there was no one who thought that personal computer architecture which had been in a standstill was aggregated into two kinds of Mac and IBM compatible machine in just a few years, it was the same with Microsoft. CS has given Microsfot an advantage over the years in that it can simultaneously develop applications for both Mac and IBM compatible machines.

Mr. Brody who was writing CS in the first summer when I joined Microsoft, but in the summer of the following year I started working on a secret new project. It was the development of inexpensive word processing software for entry in the business software market. By unifying the UI of software, Microsoft thought that users of spreadsheet software " Microsoft Multiplan " would be able to understand and use new word processing software without hardship. By unifying the UI of business software, it was a strategy to enclose users who use Microsoft products.

So the mission given to Mr. Brody was "to develop the world's first word processing software using spreadsheet UI". Thus was born "Microsoft Word". Word which is most widely used as word processing software now is born in 1983, but at that time the application department led by Mr. Brodie and Simony was a large household with more than 30 programmers and marketers It is said that.