December 9, 2002 (Computerworld) --
Charles Simonyi, former chief architect at Microsoft Corp. and now CEO of Intentional Software Corp., continues his interview with Computerworld's Robert L. Mitchell. Here he discusses his work at Microsoft, which included leading the development teams for the Word and Excel programs.
What was your most important contribution at Microsoft? When you look at Word, the fact that it has been around for 20 years and the functionality when you look at it today is so wonderful ... the design 20 years ago must have captured something right, so that it can carry the load of these innovations. Basically, it's the same design, it's the same code that is carrying the fantastic innovations that people have added to Word. I think that would be my most important contribution.
What would you say was the biggest failure? I didn't have a single, spectacular failure at Microsoft. I had failures of communication with people. I had a failure to sometimes respect the market, and I'm appreciating even now the need to learn. I know that I have to be able to listen in order to learn.
When you say failure to respect the market, were you talking about your experience with the Multiplan spreadsheet program? Multiplan was a misjudgment of the market. Microsoft made two bets at the time. One was in the operating systems arena with MS-DOS, and the other was in the application arena with the Multitools. Multiplan was done on a byte-coded interpreting system, much like Java. It was probably the most ported system ever deployed. We thought that the market would be fractured for a long time and that we would be on all of those machines -- which we were. Interestingly enough, MS-DOS changed that and created a unified market. And, of course, Lotus 1-2-3 made their bet on creating a single, optimized, direct implementation for MS-DOS, and they cleaned up. We learned a lot from that failure. And then of course, when the next shift came to GUIs [graphical user interfaces], we cleaned their clock with Excel.
In the past, you criticized your former employer, Xerox PARC, for "biggerism" -- a "bigger is better" mentality. But products such as Microsoft Office have also been criticized for being too bloated with features. Do you see an irony in that? I thought that Xerox really made a lot of mistakes. At a time when the Alto cost $50,000, they were scaling it up in every way possible instead of scaling it down. The result was, of course, failures. I think that everyone agrees that biggerism in that instance is bad. It's clear that people at different times want
(Source: Computerworld) It's the hot technology for most large companies, but business, technical and cultural issues must be addressed for a successful SOA implementation. Get the whole story, from the big picture to the how-to-do-it details, in this Executive Bulletin. Download this Executive Bulletin (a $49.95 value) for Free, compliments of Fujitsu. Download this executive briefing
Virtualization Everywhere
Download this white paper, free, compliments of Citrix. (Source: Citrix) Adoption of virtualization is concentrated among large enterprises, while adoption by mid-sized companies has been much slower. For these companies, the cost and complexity of server virtualization solutions has been a barrier.
In this paper, we'll discuss how Citrix XenServer" provides simple, economical server virtualization for any size company. Download now!
XenServer FREE trial
Citrix XenServer is the simplest and most effective way to virtualize and provision servers. XenServer combines comprehensive server virtualization capabilities with unparalleled scalability, performance, economics, and ease-of-use. Based on the open source Xen hypervisor, XenServer delivers fast performance, easy management, and advanced features such as live migration.
SQL Anywhere is the industry-leading mobile and embedded database. Designed for database-powered applications that operate in frontline environments without onsite IT support, SQL Anywhere offers enterprise-caliber features in a database that is easily embedded and widely deployed in server, desktop, remote office and mobile applications.
See your link here
Subscribe to
Computerworld 
or
Other Software Development Stories
Download this white paper, free, compliments of Citrix. 
From Laggard to Leader: Transforming the Data Center
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services. 
Computerworld