PREVIOUSLY IN THIS Web site, we exposed the origins of Microsoft AstroTurfing and people who were responsible for that. James Plamondon was among them and he had received the blessing from the very top chiefs, including Bill Gates who supported this type of behaviour. In fact, he refers to it as a requirement in some other internal correspondence.
[PDF], contains the accompanying notes from a presentation delivered by James Plamondon and his colleague, Marshall Goldberg. These are the transcripts from a presentation they both gave. The exhibit is 66-page long and we have it as full text at the bottom.
JAMES PLAMONDON: We’re going to talk about the tactics of evangelism. This is the one-slide review of the previous presentation, and that says it all right there. This time we’re going to talk about the tactics of evangelism. First, the role of ISVs. ISVs— independent software vendors—are pawns in the struggle between platform vendors. They are today’s allies; tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow, you know, it could have been that Netscape was a little applications company that we thought was great and we worked with, and then suddenly they came up with this competing platform. The bastards! And you never know which way they’re going to go. They also could join up with, you know, IBM. We worked closely with Lotus for years. Lotus was one of our stronger supporters of OLE, and yet, then IBM bought them. It kind of makes it hard to work with them quite that closely any more. So we may move in their markets; they may move into our markets, whatever.
They are very valuable pawns in the struggle, however. We cannot succeed without them. If you’ve ever tried to play chess with only the pieces in the back row, you’ve experienced losing, OK, because you’ve got to have those pawns. They’re essential. So you can’t win without them, and you have to take good care of them. You can't let them feel like they're pawns in the struggle. I mean, all through this presentation previously I talked about how you're using the pawns you're going to screw them if they don't do what they want, and da-da-dah. You can’t let them feel like that. If they feel like that, you’ve lost from the beginning. It’s like you’re going out with a girl; forgive me ___________; it goes the other way also. You’re going out with a girl, what you really want to do is have a deep, close and intimate relationship, at least for one night. And, you know, you just can’t let her feel like that, because if you do, it ain’t going to happen, right. So you have to talk long term and white picket fence and all these other wonderful things, or else you’re never going to get what you’re really looking for. So you can’t let them feel like pawns, no matter how much they really are.
Goals. Microsoft is a very goal-driven company. Every six months, hit those objectives. The goal is always the same. Your...when you’re writing your review and your-goals for the next six months, your goals should always be worded almost exactly like this: Establish (whatever it is you’re working on, insert here) as the de facto standard in the industry. That’s your goal.
The analysts...the financial analysts particularly carry a lot of weight. We may think that, you know, Christine Comerford and Jesse Burst and other people who write in the Windows magazines are important, but the most important analysts are the guys who work for, like, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and the other financial analysts. And if you can influence those guys’ opinions...and they almost never hear directly from. like, evangelists, and so when they do you have to be real careful. You don’t want Bill calling you up and saying, “What was this I saw from your _______?“ You have to be real careful. But going to those guys and giving them information can be very, very leveraged, because, you know, everybody reads PC Week, but the VPs and above, those guys are reading the Goldman Sacks analyst reports. They’re the guys, you know, really making the decisions.
Mind share. Mind share is the most important concept in evangelism. To control mental output, you have to control mental input. You’re going to control what the developers write, the code they write. You have to control what they’re thinking, which means you have to control the input to their brain. The way you do that is by taking control of the channels by which the developers receive their information. And in that I’m including the marketing slime and the VPs and execs and so forth. Thus you control mind share, by controlling input.
There are many channels of communication. There’s one-on-one. This is the staple of evangelism, where you and a bunch of people go sit down in a room and you sell them on your idea. You should support Microsoft’s Internet technology because of these three reasons...OK, and so forth. That’s why you should do it, and we’ll make it easy and we’ll ensure that you make money and we’ll give you lots of exposure and it’s the best thing for you.
Channels of Information. There’s one too many presentations where you’re actually giving a presentation at a conference. You should never give a presentation at a conference. Nobody from Microsoft should ever give a presentation at a conference if we can possibly avoid it, because you could be doing something else then. Furthermore, you’re not objective(?). Nobody’s going to believe anything you say. Get a third party to give the presentation at a conference. It’s valuable to a consultant or an analyst to give a presentation at a conference. It gives them exposure; it’s good marketing for a consultant; they want to do it, and you can get something in return. II you write this article for me or this sample code, I’ll arrange for you to speak at this conference. Oh, yeah, can I do that? They love that. So when you’re giving a presentation at a conference, you’re throwing away an opportunity to get somebody else to do something for you. OK, so you’re not only waiting your time, you’re wasting other time.
OK? Any time you can make somebody feel cool, that’s good. The sig leaders are very important people. They are people who choose. They choose who speaks and who doesn’t speak at these sig conferences. They set up the agenda. They have influence over twenty, thirty, a hundred, however many people come to this sig. And however many people are on the mailing list, which is also a valuable commodity. So those sig leaders are like consultants. They are very valuable people that you want to schmooze with.
I don’t know if everybody recognizes that word “schmooze” there at the bottom. Schmooze is, I think, a Yiddish word. Basically it means suck up to, socialize with, take care of; love and so forth, go to dinner with, get drunk together, talk about your girlfriends and boyfriends and whatever. I mean, just socialize like crazy, and pump for information, and leak little bits of tidbits of information that think...make them feel special that they’re hearing it and work the crowd and so on. Schmoozing is a very important part of an evangelist’s job, and the better you are at it. the better, because everybody who meets you should think—you know. OK, I hate Microsoft like everybody else, I’m a good member of the Computing Society, I hate Microsoft, that’s what you have to do to get in. But, you know, I like the individual people I’ve met from Microsoft. You know, you’re all ambassadors of Microsoft, and they should...if we can’t help them hating Microsoft, at least we can have them like the individuals, and that’s a big step in the right direction.
I, for example, was once a Macintosh developer. I developed Macintosh software. I never worked for Apple, but was...wrote a lot of magazine articles and stuff in the Macintosh community. I developed...I formed developer groups, I spoke at conferences, I was the kind of person that you want to find as an evangelist, because I was an unpaid guy who goes out and spreads the word. Right? Any time Apple could get me to say something it was more credible than when they said it, and I was out there doing this and I wasn’t even costing them anything. It was great. Well, I left the Macintosh world and started doing Windows stuff and became this notorious heretic, OK. But on the other hand, I was just such a hell of a nice guy—you know, you guys know that’s not true, but they didn’t—I was such a hell of a nice guy that they’d go, You know, that damned Plamondon, you know, he’s working for the Evil Empire, he’s seducing people to the Dark Side, but, you know, he’s such a hell of a swell guy...you know, I hate Microsoft, but he’s OK. Yeah, actually, it was...so you just want to be a heck of a nice guy. Being a heck of a nice...this is...One of the things I like about evangelism is that it’s one of those few jobs where being a nice guy is valuable. And it wasn’t of any value to me as a programmer. They don’t care how nice you were, they just want to know how many lines of code you write, that’s all. So, anyway.
Channels of information. There’s more of them. Developer conferences. There are two kinds of developer conferences. There’s those that are controlled by the platform vendors, such as our PDC. We control everything that goes on there; nobody says nothing that we don’t approve beforehand. Same with Brain Share and Lotusphere and Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, and I’m sure IBM has such conferences. Or there are independent conferences such as Software Development, Window, Mac Hack, various Comdex, so forth. At enemy conferences you gather intelligence. You go to the enemy sessions, see what they’re saying, talk to people, be nice. Just be super nice. You never say anything rude; never, never, never. Stand up at the microphone at an enemy conference and say, “Excuse me, you’re full of shit,” you know. “You’re wrong; that’s not true; if you looked in our documentation you’d realize that wasn’t true. You just said that OLE doesn’t do irregularly-shaped objects, that OLE doesn’t do multiple active simultaneous objects, that..you know...that they’re all heavyweight and have to live out a process. You said those things and they’re all demonstrably not true. In fact, I have a
demonstration right here on my laptop...” You know, I mean, that’s just...it’s absolutely pointless. You gain nothing, you look like an idiot, it looks like Microsoft is just, you know, raining on their parade. You just never, ever say anything like that. You can occasionally go up and say, “Hi, this was a really great presentation. Thank you very much for doing it. I had a question about one of these things. You said it would be shipping by when, exactly?” OK. That kind of thing is OK. You’re just asking for very general information that anyone else could have asked. But even then it’s better to get somebody.. .some shill to go up and ask the question for you. I mean, if you’re at a conference like that, hopefully you know some people there. Get them to go ask the question for you,what the hell.
So at independent conferences, or rather those controlled by the enemy vendor, just gather information. At independent conferences, subvert them. Find the people who choose who goes on the agenda and who doesn’t. Send that person all the free software in the world they want. Find out if their kids are in school, find out what school they go to, send them free software; see what kind of car they drive, send them a little keyring with that car’s logo on it, you know. Anything, anything. Love those people. Just suck up to them so hard your face collapses. I mean, those people...those people are so valuable to you, it’s beyond belief, because they control who goes on that session or not. At last week’s Macworld expo, I had a session added to the conference agenda called Windows95 Programming for Macintosh Developers. At Macworld! Can you imagine? OK.
JAMES PLAMONDON: It was pretty crappy because they didn’t put it on the main agenda, unfortunately. It fell off the list. I’m sure she did this on purpose. She was returning the favor to me by putting, making the session happen, but she was covering her butt with Apple by not putting it on the Conference At a Glance session—er, listing, right? The main bulletin, or the detailed description was there, but it wasn’t on the Conference at a Glance session, right, so it was kind of funny. Last year I had a similar session that I did on my own in a meeting room that I rented rather than being part of the agenda, and it was packed the whole time, you know. I carefully made sure that press and analysts came by and peeked in the door and saw that it was packed, you know. But this time it wasn’t so good.
But nonetheless, I mean, Windows 95 programming for Mac developers on the conference agenda at the Macworld Expo—I mean, you couldn’t pay enough to get that. And all it cost me was some free software, and her husband had had a stroke and I sent her some articles about recent therapy and research in strokes, went to the library and looked it up. I had a problem with that one. I mean, that one was...you know, I care about her as a person, I’ve known her for years, you know, I was truly sorry that her husband had a stroke; my grandmother died of a stroke. I was kind of interested in the topic. I went to the library anyway, I found this information. I was about to fax it to her, and I said, “Wait a minute. This is, like, totally scummy. I know I’m doing this for a purpose!”
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: I go back to my former question. How do your-sleep at night?
JAMES PLAMONDON: Well, it turns out that the information was actually quite valuable to her. I mean, it was talking about a drug and a therapy that she was not aware of, and that her doctor wasn’t aware of. So, I mean, I actually helped her and everything. She also owed me and she put my conference sked...she put my session on the conference agenda. I mean, what can I say? I’m just too nice of...OK. So you want to love those conferences to death. I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. First there was the Mac App Developers Conference. I was on the Board of Directors of the Mac App Developers Association long ago, and after I left I worked to try to turn it into a cross-platform developers conference, and I did. I managed to make it.. their last conference was very cross-platforn, both Windows and Macintosh, which of course turned off their Macintosh audience; half of the conference was irrelevant to them. They didn’t care about Windows. They were a bunch of Mac guys. Which diluted the value of the conference. And they didn’t know how to advertise the Windows guys when the Windows guys showe dup. So they lost money that year and the group folded. Oh, well. One less channel of communication that Apple can use to reach its developers.
The other conference was called the Technology and Issues Conference. it had been going on for, like, ten years. It was an independent conference. it was by invitation only. They invited VPs and above at all the major Mac software companies. And they always held it in, like, Yosemite or Vienna or Hawaii. It was a big junket thing. And it was always...they held the conference the last few days of the week before Fourth of July weekend, right, so it was just a junket trip. But Apple always hated this conference because, you know, all of their ISVs got together and received a message that they didn’t control as much as they would have liked. Well, I sponsored a dinner and I brought...because once you sponsor a dinner, right, you get to talk to them during dinner. You get to do a dinner presentation, OK, once the clatter of knives dies down. And we were there being so helpful. Apple was still nickel and diming its developers to death. And so we’re there handing out free software developers’ kits to everybody there, and free copies of the Explorer PD and other things like that for their kids, because, you know, they’d bring their wives and families along with us, and so we’d give them free games and stuff. And then I gave them this big presentation over dinner and so on. So it seemed like Microsoft dominated the conference. Well, Apple got so pissed off at this that they threatened the guy that ran the conference that they were never going to send anybody again, that they were going to schedule conferences that directly opposed it so that the VPs couldn’t go to his conference, they could only go to Apple’s conference and so forth. So by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this? I’m losing money on it every year anyway. Screw Apple, they don’t need my help. And so the conference died, so that’s two. I’m working on two other Mac conferences now.
Channels of information. They’re developer magazines. Developers love to read other people’s experiences. I remember when I was first learning programming, I was subscribing to a magazine that seemed to solve the problem I was working on every month.. Every month I’d be encountering this new problem and racking my brain, trying to figure out how to deal with it, and this magazine would come out and it solved the problem. it was amazing. It was a very introductory kind of magazine, though, and I got to a certain point where it wasn’t useful any more. But there’s a zillion programmer magazines. There’s not just Microsoft Systems Journal; there’s also...gosh, what is it, WinTech Journal, the DOS/Windows Programmers Journal; there used to be something called the OS/2 Programming Magazine, it was then OS/2 and Windows, which was then Windows and OS/2, and now it’s just Windows, and.. .and so on, OK? There’s lot’s of independent programming journals. You want to infiltrate those. Again, there’s two categories. There’s those that are controlled by vendors; like MSJ; we control that. And there’s those that are independent. The ones that we control, you use. It’s an opportunity for consultants and so forth to get their stuff published, right? You can say, if you do this...if you join this beta program, I’ll give you early access to the technology. Your deliverable is a magazine article, OK? I’m not asking you to ship a product by a certain schedule, but you must ship me an article with sample code and so forth, which I will then get published in MSJ, which will then establish you as an expert in the field, which will help your consulting business. Everybody wins, OK? So that’s how you use journals that we control. The ones that third parties control, like the WinTech Journal, you want to infiltrate. You want to get yourself onto the advisory committee that picks out which authors are published and which ones aren’t, or which topics are covered and over these special issues, things like that Just be so helpful that they can’t do without you, and then make sure that things go your way. Just help those magazines like crazy. Encourage new writers. Magazines...technical magazines face the same problems that we do in hiring evangelists. They’ve got to find people who are both very technical and know how to string words together in sentences that make sense, and people are not usually trained in both. You usually get one or the other. It’s like...when I was going to school, I was...you know, I was a science major. I wasn’t going to take any of these artsy-fartsy language and stuff classes. That’s for those losers who are in Liberal Arts, and basket-weaving classes. And so most people don’t do both. So when you can find somebody who can write an article well and point him at one of these magazines: Ooh, that’s great. Magazines love that. They owe you.
Channels of information. There’s Jots of them. There’s online forums, the Usenet groups...
So don’t waste their time. Don’t look like you’re trying to snooker them or something, and don’t sound arrogant. Microsoft people have this.. .It is going to be presumed that you’re an arrogant asshole until you prove otherwise. So be nice and polite on email.
Consultants are independent evangelists. They’re people who are out there doing our job for us, or doing somebody else’s job against us, without even being paid for it. We don’t even have to pay ‘em nothing! This is great. We don’t even have to give them stock options. They must be on the bleeding edge in order to sell their services. The only reason you hire a consultant to do something is because you don’t know how, because consultants are, by definition, these expensive guys who help you go around and help you do something That you haven’t figured out how to do yet, get your projects started, and so on. So they have to be on the bleeding edge, which means they have to be in tight with Microsoft, or somebody else, or else they can’t do their job well. Sucking up to consultants pays off very well.
They also have the patina of objectivity: this very thin layer, they can say, I don’t work for Microsoft, I’m not just spouting the Microsoft party line, but...here’s the Microsoft party line, OK? So, a very thin appearance of objectivity. Contract programming houses are the same way. If you need some sample code written, or a book or an article, or anything like that, for God’s sake don’t write it yourself. Get them to do it, because then you can do something else, like getting somebody else to do part of your work for you. It’s not only frees you up to do something else, it’s getting them to do something so that now they’re committed to it, right? They’ve written this book on OLE. They’ve learned a lot about OLE. If that doesn’t pay off for them, then they’re losing all that time, so it’s in their interest to stomp open.doc into the ground and to make OLE successful, tight? You want to get these people bought into stuff. You do that by throwing business their way.
When I do something for you, you’re supposed to do something for me. It’s a fundamental characteristic of human nature. You see it in primate societies and all sorts of stuff like that. I'll do something for you, you’re supposed to do something with me. It’s not like a law or anything. it’s just a fundamental characteristic of human nature. if you don’t do something for me, you’re a scumbag, all right. You owe me, you bastard. You see this all the time in the Hollywood thing. If you see, like, movies like The Player or whatever where people are...it’s about Hollywood. Hollywood is all about the exchange of favors and he acted in my movie and therefore I have to put him in this other movie, and so forth. And what you see is people on the phone saying, “How can you do this to me? I was at your bar mitzvah! I was...put you in the movie! I went to this play with you! I was at your daughter’s, you know, whatever, and you’re not going to let me be in your movie? You bastard!” Right? You’ve done all these favors. You’ve been...the person owes you, and not to return the favor is terrible.
Trading favors: If you help me, I’ll help you. I do this, you do that. You always return favors, right? Always. If somebody does something for you. even if you didn’t ask for them to, you have to return the favor. It’s a rule. Otherwise you’re the scumbag. Never work with somebody who fails to return a favor...for a while, anyway. There’s this rule in game theory that says, if somebody screws you over, then you should screw them over back, as hard as you can and as soon as you can. Then you forgive him, because you’re even now, right? That clears the decks and you go forward. So never work with someone who has failed to return a favor. Be sure to screw him as hard as you can as soon as you can, and then make sure that they understand what happened, and then you
Help people. Help people as much as you can, because then they owe you a favor. One of the first things I did when I started doing evangelism to the Mac community is, I started giving stuff away like crazy. Sending them the compiler; sending them the STK, sending them documentation. I had this thing that got to be known as the Plamondon Love Kit. It was this big, heavy box full of books and compilers and goodies, and Mac developers started talking about the Plamondon Love Kit, and how, you know, if you sent off to James and said that you were going to do something on Windows, he’d send you this Plamondon Love Kit. And Apple was just—arrggh, like that, because they couldn’t afford to give stuff away like that. It was very irritating to them. But then they owed me. tight? Then all those guys owed me something, and I was able to get quotes and some things out of them in return. So you want to help people so that they owe you back.
You have many resources. Remember, it’s the exchange of valuable resources, control over the distribution of valuable resources that makes you powerful. You are powerless if you do not have resources. But you do. By working at Microsoft, you have resources up the wing-wang. You have resources coming out of your pockets all over the place.
You can create your own resources. Information is the ultimate resource, and that’s what Microsoft has in abundance. We have specifications, betas. Early access to betas are, like, worth their weight in gold. If you give Company A the beta, but his competitor, Company B, doesn’t have it, Company B is at a competitive disadvantage. You control the distribution of that valuable resource. Free products. Sending off the compiler. That’s $500 you don’t have to pay. Or, in the case of the cross-compiler, the PC-Mac cross-compiler, that’s two grand. That’s a lot of money! Costs us ten bucks. What do we care? Free products, knowledge. We know things they don’t know. More resources. Job placement. 3,000 people are about to be laid off from Apple. I can help those guys find jobs. Then they owe me their livelihood. They owe me their car payment, their mortgage, their daughter’s braces, and that’s a lot to owe somebody. ISVs are looking for people. I know of companies that are looking for people who have certain skills. If I can fill that position, then the company owes me. And the guy who got the position owes me. Cool.
You can give people exposure. Consultants need exposure all the time to pull in new clients, because you can’t hardly advertise a consultancy except by demonstrating your expertise at publications, conferences and seminars. You have more resources. You have the one I hate to mention, which is cash. I hate to mention it for two reasons. First of all, you probably don’t have much. Secondly, because the ones you do have, those dollars...Microsoft dollars work just like everybody else’s dollars, right? We don’t get a discount on dollars just because we’re Microsoft. Just because we’re Microsoft we can't buy them for 80 cents each or something like that, OK? So spending...
Use the phone, email, faxes, whatever, widely. People tend to get stuck in an email rut here, and they only deal with other people by email, and that’s a big mistake. Telephone—when you just call somebody on the phone, they tell you stuff that they would never write down in an email. Email is discoverable. The Justice Department, whoever, can say, send me every email that you’ve ever written on this topic, right? It just gets pulled off the backup server, and the guy who wrote it has no clue. Email is just like...you might as well send a stamped, self-addressed copy to the Justice Department every time you send an email.
[...]
I have, still, on. ..in recorded, every email that was ever sent to me. Not to groups that I’m a member of, but that was actually addressed to me, and every email that I’ve ever sent out.
Bill Gates and the Microsoft executives consider the Developer Relations Group to be a key strategic resource. They listen to us—truly listen to us. We can use them as a resource. I came to this meeting directly after meeting with Bill Gates himself, and in a sense Bill Gates wasn’t using me, I was using Bill Gates. and Bill Gates would readily admit to that That he’s an atomic weapon.
Now what isn’t relationship evangelism? Well, when this conference was first proposed, Avery said, “Well, James is doing evangelism as war. You’ll do evangelism as love.” Wow! Relationship evangelism isn’t about love at all. As a matter of fact, people that know me, and know some of the companies I deal with, when I get upset with the behavior of a company, I’m the first one to say it, and I say it very loudly. And one of the things that I see as part of the relationship work I do, is when a company is really not doing right by Microsoft, I make certain that everyone in Microsoft feels the same way. For example, I’m having a problem—I’ll mention the company, we’re all DRG—with Peoplesoft. Peoplesoft continually flips what we call NT sales to UNIX. They’ll go into an account, they’ll claim to be platform-neutral. Why, we’re platform-neutral. We support the platform that’s best for the customer—as long as it’s H-P, UNIX and Oracle.
Well, I methodically and convincingly convinced Charles Wong and Sanjay Kumar, the president and the chairman, that Microsoft platforms in the enterprise would dominate in the distributed case.
They were so impressed with NT they adopted it internally and wiped out Novell.
Paul Maritz invited me to go out to him with Wang in early December, and I did. So that immediately makes the ISV thing...well, this guy has Paul Maritz’s ear. Well, I can. I can send him mail, or even Bill. They listen to us, because we are very.
OK, you should support Point Number One because of this, because of this, and because of this. You need to know what your because are, and if you don't have any evidence to support them, create it Find some third-party vendor who will say that this is true. Do an independent third-party study that will support those arguments. Create the evidence you need, don't just rely on it to come out of the ether. Don't just wait for somebody to write the article that says it's true. Find somebody. Say if you'll do this for me, I'll do this for you. Get it done. Then you've got your data points. So create the evidence you need.
Plaintiff's Exhibit 2456 Comes v. Microsoft
Due to the varying sound quality and subject matter of tapes, the information in this transcript may contain inaccuracies. Please proof carefully.
DRG Summit--January 16, 1996 "Power Evangelism" and "Relationship Evangelism" Presented by James Plamondon and Marshall Goldberg Tape3(VT#33l3.O3)
JAMES PLAMONDON: We’re going to talk about the tactics of evangelism. This is the one-slide review of the previous presentation, and that says it all right there. This time we’re going to talk about the tactics of evangelism. First, the role of ISVs. ISVs— independent software vendors—are pawns in the struggle between platform vendors. They are today’s allies; tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow, you know, it could have been that Netscape was a little applications company that we thought was great and we worked with, and then suddenly they came up with this competing platform. The bastards! And you never know which way they’re going to go. They also could join up with, you know, IBM. We worked closely with Lotus for years. Lotus was one of our stronger supporters of OLE, and yet, then IBM bought them. It kind of makes it hard to work with them quite that closely any more. So we may move in their markets; they may move into our markets, whatever.
They are very valuable pawns in the struggle, however. We cannot succeed without them. If you’ve ever tried to play chess with only the pieces in the back row, you’ve experienced losing, OK, because you’ve got to have those pawns. They’re essential. So you can’t win without them, and you have to take good care of them. You can't let them feel like they're pawns in the struggle. I mean, all through this presentation previously I talked about how you're using the pawns you're going to screw them if they don't do
what they want, and da-da-dah. You can’t let them feel like that. If they feel like that, you’ve lost from the beginning. It’s like you’re going out with a girl; forgive me ___________; it goes the other way also. You’re going out with a girl, what you really want to do is have a deep, close and intimate relationship, at least for one night. And, you know, you just can’t let her feel like that, because if you do, it ain’t going to happen, right. So you have to talk long term and white picket fence and all these other wonderful things, or else you’re never going to get what you’re really looking for. So you can’t let them feel like pawns, no matter how much they really are.
OK, moving it along. Tactical evangelism is getting ISDs to do what you want. So before you can get an ISV to do what you want, you have to know what you want. And that’s sometimes not as easy as it sounds. I mean,some of the Internet stuff we’re doing, we’ve just figured out what we want. We haven’t quite figured out what we want from them, and it’s very different. So what does the ISV want? It’s also a very important consideration. What do you both want? Where do your interests coincide? Where can you work together? And we’re going to talk about the channels of information, and then my favorite section on power and how to use it.
Goals. Microsoft is a very goal-driven company. Every six months, hit those objectives. The goal is always the same. Your...when you’re writing your review and your-goals for the next six months, your goals should always be worded almost exactly like this: Establish (whatever it is you’re working on, insert here) as the de facto standard in the industry. That’s your goal. Now, that’s different from an objective. I’ll get to objectives
in a minute. Whatever the platform is, you still have the same goal. Goals take longer than a review period, generally speaking, and they’re not directly measurable. And so you also need objectives. Where do you get objectives? How do you figure out what objectives are? Well, first of all, DRG does not create the platforms. Somebody elsewhere creates, you know, like, the Web, and we just come to it, like. Or somebody else creates OLE, and we’ve got to figure out what to do with it, or whatever. So someone else at Microsoft creates the platforms. They have objectives for doing so. They know what they want to do with OLE. Go talk to Tony Williams or Bob Atkinson or even Kraig Brockschmidt. Find out what their objectives are for OLE, and then try to figure out how that works with ISVs; how do ISVs play into that?
I’ve had people tell me all the time, I can’t figure out what my objective should be. Well, go talk to the person who created the technology you’re evangelizing. They’ll have some good ideas for you. There’s the platform business plan. Somebody had to sell the idea of OLE to their management. There had to be some kind of plan that went up the chain and had a group review with Bill in the Office of the President, and it got signed off on and came back down. Find that plan and get your ideas out of that for what your objectives are. Find the platform product manager. Find out what his objectives are. They didn’t think much about ISVs. Generally speaking, DRG thinks about ISVs, the rest of the company doesn’t or to the extent that they do, they’re the enemy,right? One time I tried to get in the early OLE evangelism, one of the arguments against OLE was that automation messages would not be standardized, that we were not in the business of standardizing automation messages, and that this would be a problem. That’s when I
figured, let’s find out how hard it is to standardize automation messages, and see if we should do it, or interfaces within a platform or application category. So I figured, what’s an application category that Microsoft makes no money on, so that we can possibly cooperate with other companies without having to have big political problems? And the one I decided on was charting. There was Microsoft chart, but we don’t sell it independently it always comes with Word and Excel and then so on. And so there are a whole bunch of other separate companies that have charting applications: Jendel Scientific and Deltapoint, and so forth. They do nothing but charting. And so I went to the various ISVs and said, “How would you like to all work together to form a standard charting-OLE interface for both, you know, custom interfaces and OLE automation interfaces?” And they said, “Great! Great!” But of course it only matters if Excel participates, because if Microsoft Office doesn’t use that charting interface, it really doesn’t matter. So I went to the Excel guys, which is what I had expected to do, and said specifically to...I can’t remember the guy’s name, the guy in Chart who was in charge of charting, “Hey, how would you like to standardize this stuff and work with these ISVs and make it a standard?” And his answer was very simple. He said, “Why should I work with anyone outside the company to make their products better because all it’s going to do is help them sell copies that could otherwise be a Microsoft copy?
Any money they’re making they can sell...they can spend on improving their product and staying in existence, and making it harder for us to do well. My job is to make Excel basically, like, the only application in the world. And if it doesn’t add money to my bottom line, then there’s no point in my spending any cycles on it. And I worked around to that a few times; you know, you try to evangelize your way in. Internal evangelism is always much
harder than external evangelism, and I can get to that later if anybody wants. But it basically was hopeless. The guy’s mindset was very clear. ISVs are something to crush. They’re no value to Office. Office exists to crush ISVs. And so there was no hope, and the arrangement with the other ISVs fell apart, and nothing came of it.
So when you’re talking to other platform managers, keep in mind the fact that they probably didn’t think about ISVs, and you’re going to have to pull ISV information out of them, or pull information out that then you then twist and turn into an ISV perspective. But get their objectives and turn them into your objectives. If your objectives map well to theirs, then they’ll help you because you’re helping accomplish their objectives.
People like it when you do your work for them, or their work for them.
OK. Smart objectives. You want to have smart objectives, and that’s not just the usual Microsoft definition of smart, which is as much like Bill as possible. This is specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed. So specific means, for example, for the Windows 95 logo program and the first wave program, we wanted something specific. Windows 95 logo compliant, since there’s a very specific set of definitions as what you’ve got to do to get the logo—with a few vaguenesses here and there for various reasons—nonetheless it’s a very specific set of criteria. So that’s a specific thing, something measurable. I don’t just want to get a bunch of Windows 95 logo compliant applications done some time. I want to get ten of them: ten logo-compliant applications, specifically ten that have passed Veritest, OK. They should be actionable. What ten? Any ten? You know, my buddy’s ten? I mean, it should be ten of the first wave apps, the
forty first-wave apps, or ten of the market leaders in this category, of which here they are. Ten of some specific list. The objective should be realistic. If there are forty companies you’re trying to bring over, you’re not going to get all forty. Some of them hate our guts. Some of them are owned by our competitors. Some of them are based on open.doc. Some of them are just stupid. I mean, it’s not going to happen. So you’ve got to get some reasonable subset, something realistic, and it should be timed. You want to get this done by a certain time, so your resulting objective is, in my six-month review period, I want to get ten out of the top fifty key applications of which there is a list, showing Windows 95 logo-compliant versions, at Spring Comdex in ‘95. Now, you don’t list in your objectives which ten. You list the fifty. I want to get ten of these fifty. That gives you a little flexibility. Does that make sense? Any questions on smart objectives?
DIFFERENT? SPEAKER: Did you ____________?
JAMES PLAMONDON: I have nothing to do with the first wave program, really, so I didn’t. My job is, like, Apple, and I’m doing great.
What does the ISV want? This is a lot trickier than it sounds. There’s...there’s success, is the obvious thing, but what does that mean? Does that mean financial success? Does that mean social and status success? Ray Norda and Phillipe Kahn were not motivated by financial success. They wanted to fight Bill Gates. They wanted to be the next Bill Gates, the guy on the cover of Fortune magazine, you know, the guy who was considered to be the impresario of the software industry, the guy, you know, doing stupid pet tricks
on Dave Letterman’s show. That’s what they wanted: They wanted to be the next Bill Gates, damn it. It has nothing to do with money or other things. It is widely...I’ll skip that one. It was about Scott McNeil. Anybody who’s been in the industry long enough will know what I was going to say, but anyway I’ll go right along.
Anyway, there are lots of other things that can motivate people. Sometimes they just want to play golf with people who are really important. Sometimes they want to impress their wife with how important they are. Sometimes they want to make a lot of money and retire quickly, which is very different from a guy who wants long-term financial success. Then that brings me right into the corporate versus personal success. It is a very important thing to keep track of. There’s stock price versus salary. If somebody’s paid on stock, then he wants the valuation of the company to increase, if he’s paid on salary, what does he care? He may want the stock value to increase because that’s how he’s judged as an executive, but it doesn’t really mean anything to him, and he can suffer a few quarters, you know, of downturn for long-term loss, unless, like, he’s buying a really expensive house and he has to sell stock to pay for the house. I mean, knowing these kinds of things can help you understand the individual’s motivation and make sure that you’re tailoring the message to him. There’s long-term versus short-term. Is this guy in it for the long haul? Is this guy committed to the company? Is he a true believer in the company? Is he going to suffer through hard times with the company in order to get ahead, or did he come here when the stock was going up and it looked like he was going to make a quick hit and a lot of money, and as soon as it goes down again, he’s out, right? Knowing whether this guy is going to be in for the long haul tells you whether you
should sell him with a long-term argument or sell him on a short-term argument. If it’s going to last more than six months and he’s a short-timer. you’re not going to sell him. You’ve got to sell him on a short-term argument, not a long-term argument.
Then there’s good for product versus good for resume. This is totally, totally important when you’re talking to engineers. Engineers very rarely care about the long-term health of their company, because engineers change jobs on average about once every two years. There are some engineers who live and breathe a specific product and are going to be with that product for ten years—people on the Word and Excel team, for example. Many of those guys have been working on no products but those for years and years and years, and that is a wonderful thing and it’s one of the strengths of Microsoft that we can give people that we can give people that kind of product focus. But most engineers are not like that. They’re just doing what’s interesting. They always want to work on the interesting, challenging, fascinating stuff They want to be at the cutting edge. They don’t want to use C, they want to use C++. Now they don’t want to use C-f-I-, they want to use Java. They don’t want to work on word processors; they want to work on HTML processors. They want to do what’s cool, what looks great on their resume, ‘what looks good when they’re talking to their buddies. “Yeah—I’m working on...on a Java compartner(?). I’m cool, boy. And you’re still working on that COBOL interpreter!” You know. So figuring out what the person you’re talking to wants, and put the sale in those terms, because we evangelists are just salesmen, right? We don’t usually think of it that way, but we’re just salesmen, and the technologies...what we’re selling is the technology.
OK, so you’ve talked the guy into it He’s going to do what you want. Now what? Just because the guy has decided he’s going to support OLE, for example (my favorite example), we’ll use the Internet. Say we have an Internet strategy, we’ll say hypothetically, just for the sake of argument. OK, and we’ve talked somebody into supporting our Internet strategy or some specific piece of it. In order for them to do so, they now need to, like, do something. They have to have software developer kits; they have to have training in what our strategy is. They need to have documentation. They need to have compilers and tools that support it. There’s all sorts of stuff they need. This is the evangelism infrastructure. This is the stuff you need in order to turn your sale into a shipping product. Building that infrastructure is part of evangelism. It’s easy to poke fingers around and say that it’s those guys’ job or it’s these guys’ jobs or whatever. This is especially true with training. We have this group called Microsoft Educational Services that has been notoriously pathetic at shipping courses early, but their way of dealing with courses in the past has been, if we want a course on FoxPro, we wait until FoxPro ships, and then we get some of the lead developers to help us put together the course on how to use it.. Well, that may make sense in an end user product scenario, of which FoxPro isn’t really a good example, but for a system software product, where as soon as you roll out the technology you’ve got to have ISVs already supporting it in order for it to build the momentum and so forth...That means you have to have the course done before the product goes into beta, let alone afterwards, after it ships. And so we have had just the worst time trying to pull courses out of Microsoft Educational Services. It’s just been lame.
Well, it’s been reorganized now to where it’s under Doug, OK, so there’s some hope that, you know, this situation will turn around.. But, like, don’t count on it! Work with the MS...Microsoft Educational Services guys. Try to get them to build a course in what it is you need, and if that doesn’t work, if I may quote myself, “Screw ‘em!” And find some out-of-house vendor, some training vendor, who will develop the courseware for you and then you can point people at him, right? You’re building business for him. He likes this. This is good. He can give little short courses at conferences and stuff, build up business. He’s the expert in this area. Come to me and get trained, OK. So you’ve got to build this infrastructure yourself or you will fail in accomplishing your objectives. So, since after all we’re very goal driven, very objectives driven, if you want to accomplish your objectives then build everything you need. Don’t just point fingers and whine. Whining...we don’t give people good reviews for being really good whiners.
Very often, I don’t know how it works in the field, but certainly in Corporate, people get bad reviews if they point out problems and they say,’ look, we’re going to fail if this isn’t fixed. This must be fixed or else we’re going to fail. Well, that thing doesn’t get fixed, let’s say, and so we do fail, and the evangelist thinks he’s going to get a good review because he pointed out the problem. But the evangelist in fact gets a crappy,review because he didn’t fix the problem. He didn’t go out and bang on people and bang on people’s bosses and go to Bill and do whatever was necessary to solve the problem, all right? We’re in a weird position here because you’re responsible for the whole thing. If OLE’s screwed up, if the Internet story’s screwed up. if whatever it is you’re working on
is screwed up, your job is to fix it. Don’t whine about it; fix it! OK, build the infrastructure first.
Let me go back to that one for a minute. Create supporting evidence. When you’re thinking about our Internet strategy, the main thing you want to think about is the presentation you’re going to give to an ISV that says, this is why you should support our Internet infrastructure and our internet technologies instead of Netscape’s. You should support ours because of these three reasons. There are always three reasons. Rhetorically speaking, you should always have three reasons. And for each of those three reasons, you have three bullet points that say why that’s true. These are the supporting evidence. OK, you should support Point Number One because of this, because of this, and because of this. You need to know what your because are, and if you don’t have any evidence to support them, create it Find some third-party vendor who will say that this is true. Do an independent third-party study that will support those arguments. Create the evidence you need, don’t just rely on it to come out of the ether. Don’t just wait for somebody to write the article that says it’s true. Find somebody. Say if you’ll do this for me, I’ll do this for you. Get it done. Then you’ve got your data points. So create the evidence you need.
Infrastructure. More infrastructure. There’s decision support materials. How do you make the sale happen? And once you’ve convinced one person, how does that person cover his butt when he tries to sell it to his boss? Right. Covering your butt is a very important thing in the industry. Microsoft people forget that, because generally speaking
at Microsoft you can do the right thing and ask for forgiveness later, and usually get away with it. Most companies you have to prove that it’s the right thing to do before you can get started, and that’s very hard. Proving that it’s the right thing, though. is not literally what you have to do. What you have to do is prove that the person who decides to approve it won’t be in trouble if it goes wrong, OK? That’s different from showing that it’s the right thing to do. You need to be able to prove to this person and show to this person that you’re trying to convince, that if he goes along with you and does what you say, he’ll be OK. Nobody ever went wrong for buying...got fired for buying IBM. That kind of thing. That’s cover your ass materials, right? I can talk more about that if you want.
OK, so you want white papers, demos, testimonials, analysts’ report..Analysts are even better than consultants, OK? Consultants are just people who go around and give their advice, and help people do their job. Analysts are people who do nothing but come up with scenarios arid hypotheses arid projections and estimates and stuff that people pay a lot of attention to. I mean, when Dataquest says something is true, ooh! They must have really done their homework and come up with this number. That’s not true. Dataquest said we’d sell 30 million copies of Windows95 before the end of ‘95. Oops! Not right. But, boy, it looked good on paper there for a while. I mean, we could hardly even manufacture them that fast. That was stupid. They never should have said that. I think they lowered their estimate to under 20 million now, and now, funny thing, they’re tight. Nothing like having some data, you know, on which to make a projection.
The analysts...the financial analysts particularly carry a lot of weight. We may think that, you know, Christine Comerford and Jesse Burst and other people who write in the Windows magazines are important, but the most important analysts are the guys who work for, like, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and the other financial analysts. And if you can influence those guys’ opinions...and they almost never hear directly from. like, evangelists, and so when they do you have to be real careful. You don’t want Bill calling you up and saying, “What was this I saw from your _______?“ You have to be real careful. But going to those guys and giving them information can be very, very leveraged, because, you know, everybody reads PC Week, but the VPs and above, those guys are reading the Goldman Sacks analyst reports. They’re the guys, you know, really making the decisions.
OK. Training resources. Once you’ve sold the company on implementing your technology, their developers have to be trained in how to do so. That’s where the documentation comes in. Sample code on how to do it. Mike McEwan just spent how many months, Mike? Writing the sample code for OLE control containers and OLE control samples. I mean a bunch of time.
MIKE: Oh, it took me a week, but l had ____________________________
JAMES PLAMONDON: The thing was 90% done in a week, OK. Books and articles. I mean, Kraig Brockschmidt had a heck of a time convincing DRG at the time that it was a good use of his time to write a book—the Inside OLE book. It was a darn good thing
he did it, because nobody else was doing it. I mean, the OLE documentation certainly wasn’t going to get anybody to support the code. So getting books and articles written is a very good thing. Courses. A lot of people just can’t learn unless they’re locked in a room for a long period of time....Never mind.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: We’ll open the door_____________ .
JAMES PLAMONDON: Infrastructure. There’s more infrastructure. Implementation resources. You need consultants. I’m going to talk more about consultants later. Developers who you can point at a problem. The porting lab is a wonderful infrastructure that you can bring people into the Microsoft Porting Lab and have people leave...Who here does not know about the porting lab? Don’t be shy. Good, you already know it. Tool support Debuggers. Compliance testing. All of this is important infrastructure.
There’s more infrastructure. Marketing resources. Events, catalogs, press releases, press tours, CD samplers, joint advertising. These are all things that you should arrange to have in place before you start your evangelism campaign. OK, that means you’ve got to do a lot of setup work beforehand, but it’s by far the best way to get going, because you know all of the things you need to do a course...along the course of time, are already getting set up.
Mind share. Mind share is the most important concept in evangelism. To control mental output, you have to control mental input. You’re going to control what the developers
write, the code they write. You have to control what they’re thinking, which means you have to control the input to their brain. The way you do that is by taking control of the channels by which the developers receive their information. And in that I’m including the marketing slime and the VPs and execs and so forth. Thus you control mind share, by controlling input.
There are many channels of communication. There’s one-on-one. This is the staple of evangelism, where you and a bunch of people go sit down in a room and you sell them on your idea. You should support Microsoft’s Internet technology because of these three reasons...OK, and so forth. That’s why you should do it, and we’ll make it easy and we’ll ensure that you make money and we’ll give you lots of exposure and it’s the best thing for you.
You can do those in a number of ways. You can do it in person, which is extremely expensive and time-consuming. If you go to fly somewhere and talk to people...my brother’s been flying all over the dang place, out to Toronto and Boston and in the middle of a blizzard, and Nova Scotia, for crying out loud. I mean, how many people here have been to Nova Scotia? OK. Actually, that’s a higher percentage than I expected. And are you two from Canada?
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: From Canada.
JAMES PLAMONDON: OK. So, anybody here who wasn’t born in Canada who’s also been to Nova Scotia? OK. So it’s very expensive to do these trips. It’s. ..a lot of times that you could be doing something else. You could be doing. ..Well, I’ll get to that something later. So you want to leverage that as much as possible. The time you’ve spent organizing the materials to go talk to one person.. .you want to spread that time over
as many people as possible. So you fly out to the East Coast as far as you can get and start flying back, doing as many ISV meetings as you can on the way back. That’s the way to deal with the time shift as easily as possible, and you just hit as many ISVs as possible. You spend a couple of days in Boston hitting all the Boston ISVs; you go to Chicago if you’ve got some there; you come back to the Bay Area and spend a few days in the Bay Area, and hit, you know, Des Moines or Fargo or whatever else you care about on the way back.
Videoconference is even better, if you can swing it. All Microsoft sales offices are wired for teleconference, for videoconference, and so you make an arrangement with the person in the regional office—that’s hard—for this third party to come into their office in Houston or something, and they’re on one end of the videoconference and you’re on the other in Redmond. The advantage of doing this is that you can have all the technical resources at your disposal in Redmond, or your remote site, and get these people talking, you know, just exactly the right people, rather than just you doing it with no technical backup. Videoconferences can be very good. I like videoconferences a lot. I use them a lot, but then there’s a videoconference office, like, three doors away from me.
Telephone conferences are almost as good. A telephone meeting is different from just calling somebody up on the phone and talking. All right, it’s a very different thing. When you just call somebody up on the phone and talk, which you should do, all the time, to your various ISVs, especially the low-level engineers, because they just bil-ell, they just blab all over the place. Oh, we’re...Netscape was here just the other day and it looks like we’re going to go with their plug-in model in stead of OLE. Oh, really? OK. Now, the president of the company would have said, “Yes, we’re considering all of our various alternatives and we don’t expect to make a decision for some time.” The engineer doesn’t know anything about security and so he’s just blab-blab. So just call in people. Just call to your buddies every now and then. You know, they’ll have questions and they’ll say, Hey, I need this STK. Boom! You send it out there, right? So they always look forward to your calls.
But a telephone conference is a very different thing. You send email, you schedule it, it’s an official meeting, it’s as if you’re right there in person. You’re just doing it by telephone. And so they get four or five people in a room with a speaker phone in the middle, and they, you know, have...you’ve got the meeting agenda, you have objectives that you want to accomplish in the meeting, it’s just like you’re having a one-on-one physical meeting except you’re doing it by phone. And I have had better luck with these...there are some reasons why it’s in fact better than a person-to-person meeting. You can have somebody in your office taking notes who the other guys don’t know is there, all right? And he’s writing notes, and you’re writing notes to each other and so
forth, all this kind of stuff. It can be very, very useful. So keep telephone conferences in mind.
Conferences. When you actually go to a conference, leverage the crap out of those. Always get some kind of a meeting room. We did these at the December PEC in 93. We had a bunch of meeting rooms set up and called our ISVs beforehand and arranged (at least I did) to pack the meeting rooms with ISV visits during the show, because developers coming to this location from all over the world, let’s leverage the hell out of that and meet with people who are so far away we don’t want to go there, OK? And it’s also an opportunity to just sort of put up a sign that says “The evangelist is In,” and if you want to talk to the evangelist, you know, schedule some time here. Those can really random and a complete waste of time, but every now and then they can be really interesting. They can be companies that are up-and-coming. And, you know, they're very interesting companies to work with. They’ll be a good source of quotes and magazine articles and stuff, but they won’t do a lot in the market, OK? But you never know about these guys unless you let them come to you. We are not all-knowing or all-powerful. We cannot select everything as well as we might let them come to us some.
Trade shows. I work the crap out of trade shows. My favorite thing to do is to get the map of the trade show, and you photo-reduce it down so that it’ll fit on a notebook, something like a clipboard, so that you can see the whole show floor at a glance. Then you find out...you look at the program guide to see which companies are there, and you figure out which ones you want to see. And you arrange those in a numerical list by
booth number. Then you mark all the booths that you want to visit on the map, and you draw a little line that’s the shortest path through all those booths, and I hit over fifty ISVs at a trade show that way, in two days. That’s 25 ISVs a day. Over the course of an eight-hour show that’s three an hour...twenty minutes—I mean, that’s an amazingly leveraged use of time, to hit all those companies and say, thank you for supporting Windows (always). Thank you for supporting Windows, we really appreciate your support. People are blown away by that. Wow! Microsoft is thanking me for supporting their platform. That’s amazing—I mean, it’s not like I have any choice, but we’re thanking them. So we love that. And then you say, you know, I see your product here and it looks great. You read the little blurb, you know, thirty seconds before you come up, so you know what company it is you’re talking to and what they’ve just shipped and so on. And I’d like to know, you know, is there anything I can do to help you? You don’t ask, ‘What are your plans for your future version?” because they might not want to tell you. But if you say, is there anything I can do to help you with your next version, then suddenly they say, “Yeah, we’re having problems getting a Windows NT, and there’s this, this, tha-tha-thatha,” and you say, “That’s all great, but I can’t really write that down right here? Can you send me an email? Here’s my card,” right, that pushes all the action items off on them, which means if it’s really important they’ll do it, and if not, they’re not wasting your time. And all you write down is when they expect to ship their stuff. When they expect to ship your stuff, and if there are any major blocking items. And then you’ve just gathered wonderful information, and you know an awful lot more about these companies than you might have before. And you check out, you know, whether they have any “Windows 95 Sucks” stickers in their booth or anything like that, and you just write
down some brief notes like that. And those are very, very leveraged. Work the heck out of trade shows. Don’t just go to a trade show and wander around the booths, right? Terrible waste of time.
Channels of Information. There’s one too many presentations where you’re actually giving a presentation at a conference. You should never give a presentation at a conference. Nobody from Microsoft should ever give a presentation at a conference if we can possibly avoid it, because you could be doing something else then. Furthermore, you’re not objective(?). Nobody’s going to believe anything you say. Get a third party to give the presentation at a conference. It’s valuable to a consultant or an analyst to give a presentation at a conference. It gives them exposure; it’s good marketing for a consultant; they want to do it, and you can get something in return. II you write this article for me or this sample code, I’ll arrange for you to speak at this conference. Oh, yeah, can I do that? They love that. So when you’re giving a presentation at a conference, you’re throwing away an opportunity to get somebody else to do something for you. OK, so you’re not only waiting your time, you’re wasting other time.
Road shows. Road shows are...DRG used to do this a lot. We’d put together a road show and do a twelve-city tour presenting the same all-base seminar over and over. We’ve shifted to a model more recently where we broadcast the road show content by satellite to theaters all over the world, and that works a lot better. So you pay $25 to go into the theater and sit in a darkened room with a whole bunch of other dweebs eating popcorn and watching Bill. It’s a thing. It’s a tribal thing.
Trade show booths. You can get a booth at a trade show. I mean, you can have “The Evangelist is In” booth at a trade show and just say, here’s Microsoft Developer Relations, if you have any problems, come talk to us. The problem is everybody has problems and they all want to talk to you, and they’re all random, and you really can’t do anything about them because they have to do with, you know, I have this bug in my program, or, you know, I don’t understand what this particular call in OLE does, and there’s really almost nothing you can do to help those guys. And so you end up saying over and over, you know, here’s MSDN, you should, you know, buy a subscription to MSDN, here’s how to get this information, here’s information about technical support I-can’t-help-you, I-can’t-help-you, I-can’t-help-you. And so it’s not a very positive message. So we’ve done these before, the trade show booths, but I don’t recommend
them unless, like, you’ve got a couple of really super-technical people who really can answer all these guys’ questions, but then you’re going to have a line so long the rest of the trade show is going to empty, and nobody’s going to like that.
Developer conferences: Same kind of thing. If somebody’s putting on a developer conference, say Symantec or Borland is putting on a developer conference. Boy, we want to help those guys a lot, because they’re going to be talking about how they support OLE and how they support out Internet stuff, or how they do various things, and if they’re not, we’re screwing up big-time, because that’s what they should be saying. So any time there’s a developers’ conference, we want to be involved like crazy and leverage those things like crazy.
Developers’ special interest groups. There’s a special case of one too many meetings because there’s one guy giving a presentation, and there’s a whole bunch of other people meeting, or listening. So it’s as if you had a whole bunch of people sitting around a table and you’re just selling. That’s the one case where it’s good to have Microsoft speak, is at a developers’ special interest group, because they don’t get it very often. Usually they get a vendor of a developer tool, or I went...in most places, it’s “I went to this conference and here’s what I found out,” and it’s, you know, kind of boring. Very frequently...and so having somebody from Microsoft actually come to their developers’ special interest group—it’s like, Man, we must be important! We’re cool because Microsoft is coming,
OK? Any time you can make somebody feel cool, that’s good. The sig leaders are very important people. They are people who choose. They choose who speaks and who doesn’t speak at these sig conferences. They set up the agenda. They have influence over twenty, thirty, a hundred, however many people come to this sig. And however many people are on the mailing list, which is also a valuable commodity. So those sig leaders are like consultants. They are very valuable people that you want to schmooze with.
I don’t know if everybody recognizes that word “schmooze” there at the bottom. Schmooze is, I think, a Yiddish word. Basically it means suck up to, socialize with, take care of; love and so forth, go to dinner with, get drunk together, talk about your girlfriends and boyfriends and whatever. I mean, just socialize like crazy, and pump for information, and leak little bits of tidbits of information that think...make them feel
special that they’re hearing it and work the crowd and so on. Schmoozing is a very important part of an evangelist’s job, and the better you are at it. the better, because everybody who meets you should think—you know. OK, I hate Microsoft like everybody else, I’m a good member of the Computing Society, I hate Microsoft, that’s what you have to do to get in. But, you know, I like the individual people I’ve met from Microsoft. You know, you’re all ambassadors of Microsoft, and they should...if we can’t help them hating Microsoft, at least we can have them like the individuals, and that’s a big step in the right direction.
I, for example, was once a Macintosh developer. I developed Macintosh software. I never worked for Apple, but was...wrote a lot of magazine articles and stuff in the Macintosh community. I developed...I formed developer groups, I spoke at conferences, I was the kind of person that you want to find as an evangelist, because I was an unpaid guy who goes out and spreads the word. Right? Any time Apple could get me to say something it was more credible than when they said it, and I was out there doing this and I wasn’t even costing them anything. It was great. Well, I left the Macintosh world and started doing Windows stuff and became this notorious heretic, OK. But on the other hand, I was just such a hell of a nice guy—you know, you guys know that’s not true, but they didn’t—I was such a hell of a nice guy that they’d go, You know, that damned Plamondon, you know, he’s working for the Evil Empire, he’s seducing people to the Dark Side, but, you know, he’s such a hell of a swell guy...you know, I hate Microsoft, but he’s OK. Yeah, actually, it was...so you just want to be a heck of a nice guy. Being a heck of a nice...this is...One of the things I like about evangelism is that it’s one of those
few jobs where being a nice guy is valuable. And it wasn’t of any value to me as a programmer. They don’t care how nice you were, they just want to know how many lines of code you write, that’s all. So, anyway.
Channels of information. There’s more of them. Developer conferences. There are two kinds of developer conferences. There’s those that are controlled by the platform vendors, such as our PDC. We control everything that goes on there; nobody says nothing that we don’t approve beforehand. Same with Brain Share and Lotusphere and Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, and I’m sure IBM has such conferences. Or there are independent conferences such as Software Development, Window, Mac Hack, various Comdex, so forth. At enemy conferences you gather intelligence. You go to the enemy sessions, see what they’re saying, talk to people, be nice. Just be super nice. You never say anything rude; never, never, never. Stand up at the microphone at an enemy conference and say, “Excuse me, you’re full of shit,” you know. “You’re wrong; that’s not true; if you looked in our documentation you’d realize that wasn’t true. You just said that OLE doesn’t do irregularly-shaped objects, that OLE doesn’t do multiple active simultaneous objects, that..you know...that they’re all heavyweight and have to live out a process. You said those things and they’re all demonstrably not true. In fact, I have a
demonstration right here on my laptop...” You know, I mean, that’s just...it’s absolutely pointless. You gain nothing, you look like an idiot, it looks like Microsoft is just, you know, raining on their parade. You just never, ever say anything like that. You can occasionally go up and say, “Hi, this was a really great presentation. Thank you very much for doing it. I had a question about one of these things. You said it would be
shipping by when, exactly?” OK. That kind of thing is OK. You’re just asking for very general information that anyone else could have asked. But even then it’s better to get somebody.. .some shill to go up and ask the question for you. I mean, if you’re at a conference like that, hopefully you know some people there. Get them to go ask the question for you,what the hell.
So at independent conferences, or rather those controlled by the enemy vendor, just gather information. At independent conferences, subvert them. Find the people who choose who goes on the agenda and who doesn’t. Send that person all the free software in the world they want. Find out if their kids are in school, find out what school they go to, send them free software; see what kind of car they drive, send them a little keyring with that car’s logo on it, you know. Anything, anything. Love those people. Just suck up to them so hard your face collapses. I mean, those people...those people are so valuable to you, it’s beyond belief, because they control who goes on that session or not. At last week’s Macworld expo, I had a session added to the conference agenda called Windows95 Programming for Macintosh Developers. At Macworld! Can you imagine? OK.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: How was attendance?
JAMES PLAMONDON: It was pretty crappy because they didn’t put it on the main agenda, unfortunately. It fell off the list. I’m sure she did this on purpose. She was returning the favor to me by putting, making the session happen, but she was covering
her butt with Apple by not putting it on the Conference At a Glance session—er, listing, right? The main bulletin, or the detailed description was there, but it wasn’t on the Conference at a Glance session, right, so it was kind of funny. Last year I had a similar session that I did on my own in a meeting room that I rented rather than being part of the agenda, and it was packed the whole time, you know. I carefully made sure that press and analysts came by and peeked in the door and saw that it was packed, you know. But this time it wasn’t so good.
But nonetheless, I mean, Windows 95 programming for Mac developers on the conference agenda at the Macworld Expo—I mean, you couldn’t pay enough to get that. And all it cost me was some free software, and her husband had had a stroke and I sent her some articles about recent therapy and research in strokes, went to the library and looked it up. I had a problem with that one. I mean, that one was...you know, I care about her as a person, I’ve known her for years, you know, I was truly sorry that her husband had a stroke; my grandmother died of a stroke. I was kind of interested in the topic. I went to the library anyway, I found this information. I was about to fax it to her, and I said, “Wait a minute. This is, like, totally scummy. I know I’m doing this for a purpose!”
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: I go back to my former question. How do your-sleep at night?
JAMES PLAMONDON: Well, it turns out that the information was actually quite valuable to her. I mean, it was talking about a drug and a therapy that she was not aware of, and that her doctor wasn’t aware of. So, I mean, I actually helped her and everything. She also owed me and she put my conference sked...she put my session on the conference agenda. I mean, what can I say? I’m just too nice of...OK. So you want to love those conferences to death. I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. First there was the Mac App Developers Conference. I was on the Board of Directors of the Mac App Developers Association long ago, and after I left I worked to try to turn it into a cross-platform developers conference, and I did. I managed to make it.. their last conference was very cross-platforn, both Windows and Macintosh, which of course turned off their Macintosh audience; half of the conference was irrelevant to them. They didn’t care about Windows. They were a bunch of Mac guys. Which diluted the value of the conference. And they didn’t know how to advertise the Windows guys when the Windows guys showe dup. So they lost money that year and the group folded. Oh, well. One less channel of communication that Apple can use to reach its developers.
The other conference was called the Technology and Issues Conference. it had been going on for, like, ten years. It was an independent conference. it was by invitation only. They invited VPs and above at all the major Mac software companies. And they always held it in, like, Yosemite or Vienna or Hawaii. It was a big junket thing. And it was always...they held the conference the last few days of the week before Fourth of July weekend, right, so it was just a junket trip. But Apple always hated this conference because, you know, all of their ISVs got together and received a message that they didn’t
control as much as they would have liked. Well, I sponsored a dinner and I brought...because once you sponsor a dinner, right, you get to talk to them during dinner. You get to do a dinner presentation, OK, once the clatter of knives dies down. And we were there being so helpful. Apple was still nickel and diming its developers to death. And so we’re there handing out free software developers’ kits to everybody there, and free copies of the Explorer PD and other things like that for their kids, because, you know, they’d bring their wives and families along with us, and so we’d give them free games and stuff. And then I gave them this big presentation over dinner and so on. So it seemed like Microsoft dominated the conference. Well, Apple got so pissed off at this that they threatened the guy that ran the conference that they were never going to send anybody again, that they were going to schedule conferences that directly opposed it so that the VPs couldn’t go to his conference, they could only go to Apple’s conference and so forth. So by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this? I’m losing money on it every year anyway. Screw Apple, they don’t need my help. And so the conference died, so that’s two. I’m working on two other Mac conferences now.
OK, so independent conferences, love them to death. Channels of information. They’re developer magazines. Developers love to read other people’s experiences. I remember when I was first learning programming, I was subscribing to a magazine that seemed to solve the problem I was working on every month.. Every month I’d be encountering this new problem and racking my brain, trying to figure out how to deal with it, and this magazine would come out and it solved the problem. it was amazing. It was a very
introductory kind of magazine, though, and I got to a certain point where it wasn’t useful any more. But there’s a zillion programmer magazines. There’s not just Microsoft Systems Journal; there’s also...gosh, what is it, WinTech Journal, the DOS/Windows Programmers Journal; there used to be something called the OS/2 Programming Magazine, it was then OS/2 and Windows, which was then Windows and OS/2, and now it’s just Windows, and.. .and so on, OK? There’s lot’s of independent programming journals. You want to infiltrate those. Again, there’s two categories. There’s those that are controlled by vendors; like MSJ; we control that. And there’s those that are independent. The ones that we control, you use. It’s an opportunity for consultants and so forth to get their stuff published, right? You can say, if you do this...if you join this beta program, I’ll give you early access to the technology. Your deliverable is a magazine article, OK? I’m not asking you to ship a product by a certain schedule, but you must ship me an article with sample code and so forth, which I will then get published in MSJ, which will then establish you as an expert in the field, which will help your consulting business. Everybody wins, OK? So that’s how you use journals that we control. The ones that third parties control, like the WinTech Journal, you want to infiltrate. You want to get yourself onto the advisory committee that picks out which authors are published and which ones aren’t, or which topics are covered and over these special issues, things like that Just be so helpful that they can’t do without you, and then make sure that things go your way. Just help those magazines like crazy. Encourage new writers. Magazines...technical magazines face the same problems that we do in hiring evangelists. They’ve got to find people who are both very technical and know how to string words together in sentences that make sense, and people are not usually trained in
both. You usually get one or the other. It’s like...when I was going to school, I was...you know, I was a science major. I wasn’t going to take any of these artsy-fartsy language and stuff classes. That’s for those losers who are in Liberal Arts, and basket-weaving classes. And so most people don’t do both. So when you can find somebody who can write an article well and point him at one of these magazines: Ooh, that’s great. Magazines love that. They owe you.
And any time you can add value to the independent magazines, they love you to pieces. One time I paid 20 grand (peanuts in the grand scheme of things) to get 20,000 CDs made up that had the Mac OLE Software Developer Kit on them, with some sample code and documentation and so forth. And I made a deal with the Mactech magazine, the only independent Macintosh prograimming magazine, to put this CD into the magazine. They’d never done that before, so it was blazing a new trail for them, and it was my primary channel of distributing Mac OLE to the developer community. I mean, we don’t have an MSDN/Mac. We don’t have a way of reaching Mac developers. So I used their magazine as my primary channel, which is great for them, because it adds a lot of value to their magazine. You’ve got to go buy the back issue if you don’t already subscribe, in order to get the Mac OLE SDK.. Their business in back issues went up dramatically. They hand out...I timed it to be the issue that they handed out at a developers conference, at one of the big Macworld expos, and so, you know, they’re wow! Come by our booth and get a free copy of the Mac OLE CD and the magazine. It was a big deal for them. So I was adding value to the independent magazine. Any time you can do that, they love you.
Channels of information. There’s Jots of them. There’s online forums, the Usenet groups, watch the way the Pentium Pro, or the Pentium ______ Point bug blew up on Intel. It was almost exclusively through the Internet, because the Internet chat groups just, you know, beat that one to death. There was a session going on across the hail here about how to be a good spokes-creature for Microsoft on the Internet, and I...that was actually my first claim to fame before I started doing presentations and forming users groups and so forth, was that I was really good on the Internet. And the main thing I did was that I was very formal and polite. It’s very easy to piss people off on the Internet, because all they can read is what you wrote. They can’t watch the fact that you’re smiling when you typed it, they can’t see that. And imodicons(?) don’t work because you can’t tell whether the imodicon is serious or sarcastic, right? Yeah, tight! What a moron! So always assume that you’re wrong when you’re writing something on the Net. This is the point..the way I always did. I said, “1 seem to misunderstand something. You’re saying that this is true, and this is true, but I thought that this was true. What am I missing here?” And they’d say, oh, gosh, you’re right! I guess we have to fix that. Whereas if I’d said, “You’re morons! This is true and this is true, and this is also true! You’re idiots!” They’d go,“No, we’re not You’re wrong.” Right? Nobody wants to be attacked like that. The immediate response is to defend. Whereas if you’re saying, hey, I’m missing something. I’m just a lowly guy, you know, whatever, then people are much more willing to say, oh, no problem. I can help you with that. It’s like this. Right? That gives them the opportunity to be the, you know, big important guy. So that’s good.
Developers tend to be impressed by very clear, very polite, very concise communication. If you write an email that long in which there’s only one key sentence, you’re a moron. You’re wasting the guy’s time. All you needed to do was write the one sentence.
So don’t waste their time. Don’t look like you’re trying to snooker them or something, and don’t sound arrogant. Microsoft people have this.. .It is going to be presumed that you’re an arrogant asshole until you prove otherwise. So be nice and polite on email.
Books. There’s a very active book market..by the way, how much time do I have?
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: Another ten minutes.
JAMES PLAMONDON: Shit OK. Do books. Consult books. Books are really important...a channel...consultants are really important. Consultants are independent evangelists. They’re people who are out there doing our job for us, or doing somebody else’s job against us, without even being paid for it. We don’t even have to pay ‘em nothing! This is great. We don’t even have to give them stock options. They must be on the bleeding edge in order to sell their services. The only reason you hire a consultant to do something is because you don’t know how, because consultants are, by definition, these expensive guys who help you go around and help you do something That you haven’t figured out how to do yet, get your projects started, and so on. So they have to be on the bleeding edge, which means they have to be in tight with Microsoft, or somebody else, or else they can’t do their job well. Sucking up to consultants pays off very well.
They also have the patina of objectivity: this very thin layer, they can say, I don’t work for Microsoft, I’m not just spouting the Microsoft party line, but...here’s the Microsoft party line, OK? So, a very thin appearance of objectivity. Contract programming houses are the same way. If you need some sample code written, or a book or an article, or anything like that, for God’s sake don’t write it yourself. Get them to do it, because then you can do something else, like getting somebody else to do part of your work for you. It’s not only frees you up to do something else, it’s getting them to do something so that now they’re committed to it, right? They’ve written this book on OLE. They’ve learned a lot about OLE. If that doesn’t pay off for them, then they’re losing all that time, so it’s in their interest to stomp open.doc into the ground and to make OLE successful, tight? You want to get these people bought into stuff. You do that by throwing business their way.
Consultants are one of the primary keys to effective evangelism.
So, power and how to use it, in ten minutes. Well, I’m going to go longer.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: That’s all right.
JAMES PLAMONDON: You guys are some of the most powerful people in the software industry today. Evangelists sometimes think of themselves, especially at a remote site...I used to work at Microsoft’s Bay Area embassy, OK, down in San Mateo, a suburb of San Francisco. And so I understand what it’s like to work in a remote site.
Admittedly I was only two hours away by air, so it wasn’t as remote as some of you, but nonetheless it seemed pretty remote at the time. We couldn’t find out who was in charge of stuff, we couldn’t get things we needed, and soon. So I understand how that works.
Nonetheless, you have a great deal of power. Power is the ability to get things done. The source of power is the ability to control the distribution of valuable resources, because there’s this fundamental concept of psychology and sociology that’s called reciprocity.
When I do something for you, you’re supposed to do something for me. It’s a fundamental characteristic of human nature. You see it in primate societies and all sorts of stuff like that. I'll do something for you, you’re supposed to do something with me. It’s not like a law or anything. it’s just a fundamental characteristic of human nature. if you don’t do something for me, you’re a scumbag, all right. You owe me, you bastard. You see this all the time in the Hollywood thing. If you see, like, movies like The Player or whatever where people are...it’s about Hollywood. Hollywood is all about the exchange of favors and he acted in my movie and therefore I have to put him in this other movie, and so forth. And what you see is people on the phone saying, “How can you do this to me? I was at your bar mitzvah! I was...put you in the movie! I went to this play with you! I was at your daughter’s, you know, whatever, and you’re not going to let me be in your movie? You bastard!” Right? You’ve done all these favors. You’ve been...the person owes you, and not to return the favor is terrible.
Trading favors: If you help me, I’ll help you. I do this, you do that. You always return favors, right? Always. If somebody does something for you. even if you didn’t ask for
them to, you have to return the favor. It’s a rule. Otherwise you’re the scumbag. Never work with somebody who fails to return a favor...for a while, anyway. There’s this rule in game theory that says, if somebody screws you over, then you should screw them over back, as hard as you can and as soon as you can. Then you forgive him, because you’re even now, right? That clears the decks and you go forward. So never work with someone who has failed to return a favor. Be sure to screw him as hard as you can as soon as you can, and then make sure that they understand what happened, and then you clear things and can go forward.
Help people. Help people as much as you can, because then they owe you a favor. One of the first things I did when I started doing evangelism to the Mac community is, I started giving stuff away like crazy. Sending them the compiler; sending them the STK, sending them documentation. I had this thing that got to be known as the Plamondon Love Kit. It was this big, heavy box full of books and compilers and goodies, and Mac developers started talking about the Plamondon Love Kit, and how, you know, if you sent off to James and said that you were going to do something on Windows, he’d send you this Plamondon Love Kit. And Apple was just—arrggh, like that, because they couldn’t afford to give stuff away like that. It was very irritating to them. But then they owed me. tight? Then all those guys owed me something, and I was able to get quotes and some things out of them in return. So you want to help people so that they owe you back.
You have many resources. Remember, it’s the exchange of valuable resources, control over the distribution of valuable resources that makes you powerful. You are powerless
if you do not have resources. But you do. By working at Microsoft, you have resources up the wing-wang. You have resources coming out of your pockets all over the place.
You can create your own resources. Information is the ultimate resource, and that’s what Microsoft has in abundance. We have specifications, betas. Early access to betas are, like, worth their weight in gold. If you give Company A the beta, but his competitor, Company B, doesn’t have it, Company B is at a competitive disadvantage. You control the distribution of that valuable resource. Free products. Sending off the compiler. That’s $500 you don’t have to pay. Or, in the case of the cross-compiler, the PC-Mac cross-compiler, that’s two grand. That’s a lot of money! Costs us ten bucks. What do we care? Free products, knowledge. We know things they don’t know. More resources. Job placement. 3,000 people are about to be laid off from Apple. I can help those guys find jobs. Then they owe me their livelihood. They owe me their car payment, their mortgage, their daughter’s braces, and that’s a lot to owe somebody. ISVs are looking for people. I know of companies that are looking for people who have certain skills. If I can fill that position, then the company owes me. And the guy who got the position owes me. Cool.
You can give people exposure. Consultants need exposure all the time to pull in new clients, because you can’t hardly advertise a consultancy except by demonstrating your expertise at publications, conferences and seminars. You have more resources. You have the one I hate to mention, which is cash. I hate to mention it for two reasons. First of all, you probably don’t have much. Secondly, because the ones you do have, those dollars...Microsoft dollars work just like everybody else’s dollars, right? We don’t get a
discount on dollars just because we’re Microsoft. Just because we’re Microsoft we can't buy them for 80 cents each or something like that, OK? So spending...
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: Just in Canada.
JAMES PLAMONDON: Right. You guys, you three guys ignore that comment. When we spend a dollar it’s not any more leveraged or any more valuable than Apple or Netscape or anybody else spending dollars, except that we have more of them so, like, we can bury them in dollars, which is, like, a totally stupid way to act, all right, because we have things that are much more valuable that cost us less. Co-marketing. We go all over the place and talk to all sorts of people. We put ads in the paper, we have trade shows and booths and so forth. We can get them in our booths. It doesn’t cost us very much, and it’s very good for them. Contracts. We need sample code written. We need this work done. We need all sorts of stuff We need applets for Windows 96 to demonstrate its new features. All sorts of stuff We’ve got to pay somebody to do that. It’s almost never done actually at Microsoft, so you can hand out the contracts. Somebody’s got to get it, you know. You don’t want to just trade money for the code. You want to trade money and something for the code, right? You’ve got to go to a conference and talk about it too, or else I’m not going to give it to you.
Technical Support. Well, you know, tech support costs money, but you can fudge a little on it. What I do is I promise people enhanced technical support, which means that they go through the normal technical support channels, and if PSS doesn’t satisfy their need,
then they send me the email thread of the service request. and then I’ll send it around through channels and say, hey, PSS, why didn’t you solve this problem? The key thing there is that they have to send me the email thread of the service request, which means that PSS actually has to screw up for them to send this to me. They have to go through PSS first. PSS is very good, and so it doesn’t usually happen. So I almost never have to deal with this, but it sounds great. Ooh, if you have a problem with PSS, escalate it to me. Cool.
Sales force. You say that our sales force will have access to your beta or your demo so that they can demonstrate it to customers. It doesn’t mean they’re actually going to do it, you’re just going to have access to it. It’s a very valuable thing. If there’s a very new technology like some of the Internet stuff; whoever jumps first on our Internet stuff— they’re doing OLE controls, using sweeper and so forth—we’re dying for demos of that stuff. We’ll include them in the demo. They’ll get demoed everywhere we go. That’s great exposure for them.
Solution providers. We’ll give them access to the Solution Provider list. We’ll let them speak at conferences. We can put on conferences, right? You can have a conference just for your ISVs. An endless supply of resources. You can have some exclusive event—I love this. If..say you’re in Japan. You’ve got fifty big customers. They’re the big Microsoft accounts in the area. You can put on a little, tiny trade show which is...you invite in your fifty biggest customers, and you have a little trade show that’s for your leading ISVs. By invitation only, and you tell your ISVs that if you adopt these
technologies we’ll invite you to the trade show, and if you don’t we won’t, but we’ll invite your competitors. Wow, you’ve just created an event to be an incentive for these people. It cost you very little. You just do it in your regional office or rent a skating rink or something.
T-shirts. I love T-shirts. I had this one made up, it cost me $20 each. It says “Decision ‘95;” it’s a Mac logo turning into a Windows logo, OK? This logo right here was actually used by Macweek magazine last year to talk about the switch between Macintosh and Windows. So I made up a bunch of these shirts in preparation for a meeting with Macweek. Oh, these guys had to have the T-shirts! Oh, gosh, these T-shirts were great. So I said, well, I only have a few, and OK, I’ll give you one, and you one. So now these guys owe me, right? I’ve given them a favor. They owe me.
Newsletter. You can always create your own newsletter. This...can anybody read that? You can’t read it because there’s nothing there. This is a white piece of paper. It’s blank. You can write anything you want on this and send it to your ISVs! Cool! So you can just make a newsletter out of nothing, and send it to people, and generally speaking if it’s from Microsoft they’re going to read it. You put it in a nice form size that’s easy to read in the bathroom. You can guarantee it’s going to get read. Create it, you know, and maybe you can mention your ISVs in it. If somebody has really done a great job, right, then you can say, “And thanks to thus-and-such for their great job implementing this,” or you can let them write an article about bow easy it was to implement your favorite
technology in the newsletter. Cool. And then you can promise to send the newsletter to your corporate customers. Way cool!
Form a developers’ group. If there’s not a developers’ group in your area, create one. Let it meet in the Microsoft office, bring in all the developers you care about, and then you get to say who speaks to them each time, right? So you’re controlling the channel of information. And people have a limited amount of time; they can’t go to everybody’s developers’ group, so if they’re coming to yours, they don’t have time to go to somebody else’s. You win!
OK. Create your own resources. What else can we do? Oh,, we can focus on getting things done. Am I, like, way over time here?
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: You’re five minutes over. That’s OK. Ask Marshall if it’s OK..
SIDE B.
JAMES PLAMONDON: Marshall, is it OK?
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: Of course it’s OK.
JAMES PLAMONDON: Yeah, he owes me. OK. Getting things done. I’m going to focus on this pretty quick here. Focus. There is way too much to do at Microsoft. Evangelists have too much to do because, as I’ve said earlier, you are responsible for your technology being done right and being widely adopted, so you have way too much to do. You can’t do it all. Don’t even try. You have your objectives that you’ve just decided on for the next six months, right? Or that you’re about to. and go over with your boss. Never have more than three objectives, maybe four if you absolutely have to.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: Well, the form says five or seven.
JAMES PLAMONDON: I know. They’re full of crap. You can never do five or seven objectives. It’s too many. OK, so focus on your top three objectives, OK and get...
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: ______________
JAMES PLAMONDON: Well, those are goals. Those aren’t objectives. So you can’t ignore the rest of your objectives if you can’t...I mean you can’t totally ignore them, but
do your best. Try, try to ignore everything but your top three objectives. Set aside one day a week—not Friday, like Wednesday or something—for busy bullshit work, OK. For filling out meeting reports and for, you know, telling your boss what you’re doing and for, you know, other staff. And try to do that only during your bullshit day. And keep a little list on your board of things that you need to do during your bullshit day, right? And when your boss comes to you and says, you really need to do this, you say, Absolutely! I’ll positively do it..on my bullshit day. Well, maybe you shouldn’t tell him that, but you say, I’ll do it Wednesday, and just do it then. That only wastes 20% of your time, and that means 80% of your time is focused on doing your top three objectives, right? If you accomplish your top...Remember, did you go through this review process with your boss already? How many people have already gone through the review process with their boss? Fewer than will _________ is good at this point. When you did that, all five of you, your boss said, “OK, these were your objectives. Did you accomplish them or not?” There was nothing on there about bullshit and ______ trivia. There was nothing on returning email. That wasn’t an objective. There wasn’t anything on other bullshit stuff, so try to get away from that. Don’t do that if you can avoid it. Live, sleep, and eat your job...breathe your objectives, and if it’s not in your objectives, forget it! Plan ahead. Start too early if at all possible, because things happen so fast and there’s so much bullshit that comes your way, that if you don’t start too early you won’t get done in time. Everyone will tell you to wait because, oh, we don’t have the strategy quite figured out yet and the message is unclear, and we don’t know if this is the right thing to do or not. Whatever.
JAMES PLAMONDON: Exactly. Right. I mean, reserve the space, talk to your ISVs, get things going, maybe you have to back up later. Better you have to do that, because then they really feel like they’re totally on the inside, right? But better to have to do that than to not have your slut together early enough, because otherwise it’ll all come down on you the last weekend, and you’ll be totally screwed.
Use the phone, email, faxes, whatever, widely. People tend to get stuck in an email rut here, and they only deal with other people by email, and that’s a big mistake. Telephone—when you just call somebody on the phone, they tell you stuff that they would never write down in an email. Email is discoverable. The Justice Department, whoever, can say, send me every email that you’ve ever written on this topic, right? It just gets pulled off the backup server, and the guy who wrote it has no clue. Email is just like...you might as well send a stamped, self-addressed copy to the Justice Department every time you send an email.
Faxes. Faxes are nice. It’s written, people read it, then they toss it, right? I like faxes. I use faxes a lot, especially for marketing slime. They look pretty. You can make a fax look really pretty, which is good for marketing people.
Think ahead. Deliver a complete solution. Like I said earlier, all these things about the evangelism infrastructure: Build that infrastructure beforehand. You don’t want to go
out on a meeting and say, well, you should support my new technology because of this and this and this, and they say, oh yeah, prove this is true, and you say, well, I can’t, really, but Bill says it’s true, so you should do it. OK? It’s not going to convince anybody. So you need to know ahead of time what you’re going to say so that you can create the evidence you need to make your point persuasive. Keep good notes so you know what it is you did. As I mentioned to somebody earlier, I have, still, on. ..in recorded, every email that was ever sent to me. Not to groups that I’m a member of, but that was actually addressed to me, and every email that I’ve ever sent out. My MMF file was over 300 megs, but I have a hard drive that’s set aside specifically for that. What do I care how many megs it is? Microsoft’s paying for the hard drive, right? This time, every time anybody asks me what happened three years ago when this thing with Apple happened, you just go search the thing, find the email, and my butt’s totally covered, right? I know exactly what I did. I don’t need to keep notes, I’ve got it all in email.
Leverage. Never do anything yourself. This is the key point about consultants. If you do anything, almost, you’re wasting your time. Get somebody else to do it for you. It makes them your ally.
Conference presentation: I’ve already gone over this. So. summary. You Set the standard. You have the power. Use it. Use the power that’s zapping out of your fingertips like lightning bolts. Make things happen; kick some ISV butt, take no prisoners: Windows! Windows! Windows! Windows!
Questions, before Marshall takes the floor?
Thank you very much.
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: Thanks a lot, James.
JAMES PLAMONDON: Oh. I have one other thing that I’m going to hand out. This is a...
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: ...but I really agree with James a lot. What is relationship evangelism? Well, I thought about this this morning. How could I put it in one long sentence? And to me it’s really the process of establishing relationships with key individuals at target companies, and using those relationships—and here’s the big word— to leverage the adoption of Microsoft technologies. Now obviously that doesn’t work at every company. In some companies the best approach is really to get the developers on your side, and allow it to filter up. So you get the developers on your side and after a while the developers speak to their managers. In the space that I work in, which is the enterprise software space, companies don’t work that way. Usually there’s one strong boss. Also the other side of the relationship is the relationship within Microsoft. One of the powers that you have that I notice that James didn’t have in his slides, that I’m sure he’ll put in his next set now that I’ve mentioned it...James sort of absorbs our wisdom like a sponge over there. He’s become sort of the group’s theoretician, so I’m sure he’ll absorb this. Bill Gates and the Microsoft executives consider the Developer Relations
Group to be a key strategic resource. They listen to us—truly listen to us. We can use them as a resource. I came to this meeting directly after meeting with Bill Gates himself, and in a sense Bill Gates wasn’t using me, I was using Bill Gates. and Bill Gates would readily admit to that That he’s an atomic weapon. He’s very powerful in dealing with third-party companies. Our execs are very powerful. They’re respected. they’re listened to, they’re smart. They’re very smart, and they’re very capable at helping you out. And they will, in certain situations, and they do in certain situations. So the notion of the relationship isn’t just with the target companies. It’s also within Microsoft. So probably this relationship evangelism statement even needs to be broader than it is.
Now what isn’t relationship evangelism? Well, when this conference was first proposed, Avery said, “Well, James is doing evangelism as war. You’ll do evangelism as love.” Wow! Relationship evangelism isn’t about love at all. As a matter of fact, people that know me, and know some of the companies I deal with, when I get upset with the behavior of a company, I’m the first one to say it, and I say it very loudly. And one of the things that I see as part of the relationship work I do, is when a company is really not doing right by Microsoft, I make certain that everyone in Microsoft feels the same way. For example, I’m having a problem—I’ll mention the company, we’re all DRG—with Peoplesoft. Peoplesoft continually flips what we call NT sales to UNIX. They’ll go into an account, they’ll claim to be platform-neutral. Why, we’re platform-neutral. We support the platform that’s best for the customer—as long as it’s H-P, UNIX and Oracle.
And somehow the field doesn’t get it, and they keep on introducing Peoplesoft to
accounts. Well, I’ll tell you, Peoplesoft doesn’t feel very loved by me. They don’t feel loved by me at all. It’s not anything about love.
Also, it isn’t sacrificing Microsoft’s business interest to get people to like you. Sure, I like people to like me, I admit it. But I’m not going to sacrifice Microsoft’s business for one second to get them to like me. And it really isn’t about giving away free software. Free software is a weapon that we use, and it’s a power that we have to help companies get going and get moving, and you never know where that’s going to lead you. Sometimes you’ll drop a piece...you’ll meet someone at a conference and they’ll say, well, we’ve never really tried NT Workstation, and you won’t even know whether it will lead to anything, but you’ll say why don’t I send you a copy. And you’ll find out six months later that they’re now associated with a software company and they’re doing something useful, but that really isn’t about giving away free software. So these are all misconceptions that people have about what I do, and why I’m so effective.
Relationship...and notice I’ve...I used to say it was a powerful tool. Now I’m going to use the word weapon, since I’m a disciple of James, you know, and weapons. And the relationship is the most powerful weapon you have with most companies. First of all it isn’t just business to me. It’s more than business. James would say it’s eat, drink, breathe. I eat, drink, and breathe my work. I carry a cell phone wherever I am. I answer it I get woken up in the middle of the night sometimes thinking about problems at work and how I plan to resolve a situation. It’s a big deal to me, but it is personal to me too. I
take it personally. And I see those relationships as a reflection of myself. I have my own integrity, and of Microsoft as well.
So my relationship with the people I work with, whether we disagree about an issue or not, I want it to be respectful and I want it to be a reflection of Microsoft. So that’s very important to me, that it’s more than just business, but it’s still business. We have a job to do. But it’s more than just business. It’s more than just sending a cold fax to someone. I want to know the names of their children, and I care about them., I care about their careers. And sometimes they’ll move from company to company and they’ll remember me, because I care about them personally, and that’s not an affectation. It’s me as a person. That’s why I love evangelism. It’s part of what’s wonderful about evangelism. You get to go on airplanes. You meet new people. You get to meet new people with different kinds of companies.
But evangelism is different for the companies I work with. I work with enterprise companies, and they almost are like old ladies’ clubs. They’re like groups of old ladies. For example, the AS-400 ISVs: It’s like a club, the press and the AS-400 spades, the people in Rochester, Minnesota where the AS-400 is manufactured, and the ISVs. They all talk to each other. I was one of the first Microsoft people in history to go to Rochester, Minnesota and visit the AS-400 group. Within 48 hours I had telephone calls from five or six of the AS-400 ISVs. “We heard you were in Rochester. We heard you were in Rochester.” So there’s a club attitude about being in these various spaces, or pick. Pick is a business operating system that Tim McCaffrey knows a lot about. Once
again, it’s like a club. When the late Dick Pick was still alive, like everyone would call each other about his latest exploits with his rap-singer wife. It’s really a club.
So what you want to do is, in each one of these clubs—in James’ case, he’s been privy to a very big club, we can call it the Apple-Macintosh club, and he’s been doing exactly the same sort of things that I’ve been doing in the AS-400 club, or I’ve been doing in the Pick club. They’re really very much the same; a little bit different twist to what I do, but pretty much the same. Learn their business and their language. Join and be heard. Become part of the club. Now, that’s exactly what James does. He goes to the Mac conferences. They see him as a Mac person. I’m the same way in the AS-400 world. I speak at AS-400 conferences. I know the names of all the people in Rochester. I know all their personalities. I know their attitudes about Microsoft, and I know the convincing business arguments that will lead IBM to support us in that space more than anyone ever thought possible. So that’s very, very important; a very powerful weapon.
Each one of us, because we are a strategic resource and carry the Microsoft message, can make a huge difference. We have a terrible reputation out there, we really do. We can be very hard to work with. There are lots of what we call fiefdoms: like, Microsoft isn’t really one company. It really isn’t It’s a lot of little companies under one banner, and sometimes the little companies fight with each other. Like one group has a transaction model that’s not the same as Network OLE. So we have those things happen all the time. So we’re difficult to deal with, but on top of it we have a reputation. People think Microsoft is predatory, that the only reason we’re interested in what they do is because
we want to steal their business. So when we go into a company like in enterprise applications, their always concern, is Microsoft going to make manufacturing software? Is the only reason you’re here, Marshall, is to learn about our business and then...then put us out of business. And there’s a lot of fear of that, and at times, if you deal with a utilities company, you have to make them aware that Microsoft may go into that business.
And you have to be very careful not to appear to be predatory, arrogant. Microsoft people have a reputation of being very, very arrogant. I think what happened to us and the Internet will help a lot of people become a little more humble. It doesn’t mean you have to be falsely humble. I’m very proud of Microsoft. I’m very proud of what Microsoft has done, and I’ll defend Microsoft vigorously, but there’s no need for arrogance. There are a lot of very smart people out there that don’t work at Microsoft, and there are people that will do things that Microsoft didn’t think of,and won’t be able to do. And the third thing that people feel about Microsoft, and we actually have been guilty in the past, is forces unfair deals. And we’ve paid for those dearly. And when Mike Maples was at Microsoft, when...before he became a consultant and semi-retired, he used to say that of all the things that he didn’t like about Microsoft is that some people felt when they were dealing with people they had to structure a deal that was very unfair to the company the deal was made with. One of the things I do as an evangelist is, I do strategic deals.
We just signed a deal—this is a secret—with the SignOn Company. That was not an unfair deal. Anytime you make a deal, a deal with a company, you have to make certain that it’s fair to both Microsoft and the company. Why? It’s good business for Microsoft.
You want people who deal with Microsoft to flourish. Making them successful using our technologies is a very important goal. So that’s kind of the reputation we have and it will work against you.
There’s easy ways to overcome that, very easy. First of all, be candid. If you screw up, say I screwed up. It’s easy to do, doesn’t hurt, and people will respect you for telling the truth and not what we call spinning the truth all the time. A perfect example was with Computer Associates. It took our PSS two months to fully resolve a problem with SQL 6. 1 just had to brief Bill on it, and I just put it right down. We’ve screwed up. And when Bill spoke to the head of CA, he just said, “We screwed up.” And it’s just much easier if you’re candid about things. Positively, too. Positively, too. Be open. Be as open as you can be. There are ways of being open without giving people secret information, but be as open as you can about what we’re doing and what you can tell them. And be as helpful as you can be, even if you’re not in marketing. You can always refer them to local office. You may be able to nag a representative to help. If there’s one message I can get across here, though, it’s really this last point. It’s to communicate. Communication...James doesn’t specify communication specifically as a weapon or as a tool. I do. I believe that that’s one of the biggest things we have going for us, and there’s a certain cachet working for Microsoft. Cachet is...how would you put it, James? James would know.
JAMES PLAMONDON: A name.
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: There’s sort of a glory to working for Microsoft, and occasionally you’ll realize it. I was in Atlanta once, and the son of one of the people that I was working with was there, and he said, “Do you work for Microsoft?” And I said, “Yes.” And he goes, “Do you know Bill Gates?” And I said, “Well, not personally, but I do see Bill fairly often. I know what he’s like. He makes me laugh, I make him laugh.” “And you’re a Microsoft evangelist?” And I said, “Yes. Look at my card.” And he goes, “Can I have your autograph?” So there is...you carry something with you. You carry something with you. It’s maybe not your...
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: How much did you charge him for the autograph?
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: He didn’t charge me anything for the autograph, but it’s sort of a lesson that you carry a certain weight with you. Well, I carry a certain weight with you, but that’s a different kind. But you carry a weight with you, a weight of Microsoft, that means a lot to people. So you can use it, and.using it wisely, you can really help people out and you can help Microsoft out a lot. Make phone calls.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: Let me just make one small note. Anybody who didn’t get copies of Marshall’s slides? There weren’t enough. OK, so I’ve got a few more here, so...
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: Make phone calls, send email, but most importantly, return phone calls. No one’s perfect at Microsoft on this, including me. It’s almost impossible to return every phone call. But I’ll have to say, among the ISVs the number one complaint I have is people don’t return phone calls and don’t communicate. It's really an easy thing to overcome. It doesn’t take long just to even make a placeholder phone call or send off a quick piece of email. Set expectations: Obviously we don’t do support. We don’t do sales. Never be afraid to say no when needed. And don’t quibble with people. I work in a space where it’s important for most ISVs to provide some sort of support, either to the AS-400 or UNIX. I’m not going to quibble with them about it. I’m really not. That’s just not worthy of what we do. And don’t excessively bash the competition. Probably the big one there, because I’m now involved in the relationship, is I...I’m working with IBM now. And our position with IBM...by our, I mean Microsoft’s position with IBM...is Microsoft is making...is IBM is making a big mistake thinking that Microsoft is IBM’s competition. We believe that IBM can take Microsoft intellectual property—that’s software—, take our work, and use it to leverage their own business. That’s really what we think on all levels of the company, and what we want to see happen. Well, if you go out there and excessively bash OS/2 or IBMor the mainframe or the AS-400, no one wants to listen to you, so...and you’ll damage your relationship with the people you work with. Also, understand your ISV can have different priorities. Like, with an AS-400 ISV, they have to first take care of what puts the food on their tables, what makes their car payments. So don’t feel badly if, let’s say, they do their AS-400 version first, and remember we’re not IBM or H-P. We provide more information than
IBM or H-P. but we very rarely provide direct financial assistance or personnel to help out ISVs.
Who do I deal with, as a relationship evangelist that’s focused on the relationship? Well, every company has a different structure. Some companies like Microsoft, they have what we call fiefdoms or different sections of the company that run pretty separately with an executive at the top, and they range from being so independent it’s hard to believe they’re one company, like Sterling Software. Does anyone know anything about Sterling
Software? Each division he does...each division has a separate president. It’s almost like they’re completely separate companies, and it’s tough for us because where does the decision get made, and how does an evangelist deal with eight separate companies under the name of Sterling Software?
Identify the decision makers. In some companies it’s easy, like with Computer Associates it’s very easy for me. There are two, the chairman and the president No one else makes any decisions at all. That’s actually very good news. From an evangelist’s perspective, it means all you have to do is get two people on your side and have a good relationship with those two people, and game, set, match, you win. And that’s certainly been true with Computer Associates, although the relationship is difficult.
There’s no democracy in business. You can’t expect...you can’t necessarily expect there to be votes, so even if all the developers happen to like you in a company, a perfect example is J.D. Edwards & Company. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to..their
feelings will translate into support for our products. Few companies are like Microsoft, and interestingly enough, virtually everyone will say they’re exactly like Microsoft. I’ve had companies that have been owned by one person, where one person makes every decision in the company, and people live in fear every day that they’re going to get fired because the boss wakes up and he’s in a bad mood and didn’t have his breakfast, or couldn’t go to the bathroom that morning, and then will come in and fire everybody. And they’ll tell me, “Oh, we’re just like Microsoft.” I’ll go wait a minute, this is not true. But a lot of people feel they are.
And actually most companies, when you look in my space, the enterprise space, there’s some form of dictatorship. And for us, that actually makes it easier. For example, this morning when Charles Wong was talking about CA, he was talking about how admired the government’s structure in Singapore; And I don’t know ii any of you are from Singapore, are any of you from Singapore? Well, Singapore is run, shall we say, very autocratically, where one fellow, like, makes...runs the country. So that gives you some idea of how some of these leaders view their companies; and actually, as I say, it makes it easier for you as long as you deal with the right people. If you don’t deal with the key confidants and advisors, the key people that advise the decision makers, if they don’t like you and you don’t deal with them, it doesn’t matter how good Microsoft’s technology is. If they like Scott McNeil better than they like you and you can’t develop a good relationship with the decision makers, they don’t care what their customers want. They’ll use as an excuse, they’ll say, “Our customers tell us.....” but it’s really not. It’s really what the boss tells them. It really is the boss. So it’s very important that you infect those
key confidants and advisors and make them believe in Microsoft. And make them believe in you and in the people at Microsoft.
Success and failure. We have only one mission here. I mean, it’s wonderful to have friends out there in the software industry, but we must have a critical mass of applications on our platforms. That’s our mission. All this other stuff has nothing to do with our mission. We need commitment. We need press releases. We need milestones. We need next steps. And of course we need delivery. Having Computer Associates’ Unicenter for NT Shipping makes all the difference in the world between a hundred promises versus one delivery of a key application is a huge, huge difference. And we want exploitive implementations on our platform, we don’t want lame ports, but I’m sure you’ve heard that.
Here are some examples of some of the companies I deal with and how relationship evangelism has worked, and sometimes hasn’t worked. I’ll be blunt It doesn’t always work. Evangelism doesn’t always work. Now, I remind you that when I started working in the enterprise we had zero mind share. No one thought Microsoft was an enterprise software company. I went to one Computer Associates event and Charles Wong, who is the leader of Computer Associates, said to me...he goes, “Why is Microsoft in the server operating system business? That’s what IBM does. You people, you’re on the desktop.” And at the same meeting...I’m at this meeting with all these chief information officers from some of the biggest companies in the world, and I have the Microsoft badge on, thinking gee! Everyone’s saying, “What are you doing here? You’re from Microsoft.
You’re the guys on the desktop. You’re not in the enterprise.” And then I went over, and I wanted to get a sandwich, I was hungry, I go up to the guy to make the sandwich and he goes, “Microsoft? I love them!” So we have a little different...it’s a little different, it’s a little different when you evangelize to a community where you have mind share, like the guy serving the roast beef. It’s a lot easier to have him do things with Microsoft technologies than when you start off with zero mind share and zero market share. We had no market share. So what are we doing in this business?
So what’s happened to Computer Associates? Well, I methodically and convincingly convinced Charles Wong and Sanjay Kumar, the president and the chairman, that Microsoft platforms in the enterprise would dominate in the distributed case. In distributed computing Microsoft, no doubt about it, would be number one. And here’s why a great development team.. the NT Development Team. Fantastic technology. Tons of money—over two billion dollars, two billion dollars, invested in the technology. And a will to succeed.
So what’s happened since then? We now have CA Unicenter shipping their next generation product, which has this wonderful graphical interface. 100% Windows NT. It doesn’t even run on UNIX. It’s completely designed to Windows NT. We also signed a
contract with CA to manufacture CA Unicenter with NT Server, and we’re getting all their bus...major business applications, they’re all about to enter beta. Their HR product is already in beta. That’s the difference that’s been made by getting to just the people at the top. It hasn’t been a matter of a lot of little tactical things. It’s been getting to
Charles and getting to Sanjay, and using, frankly, our execs who’ve been great about this. All across Computer Associates now, everywhere you go in Computer Associates, all they talk about is NT. NT is their standard desktop. Exchange is becoming their mail system. They have over 1,000 users on Release Candidate One of Exchange. So that’s the kind of difference I as an individual evangelist have made at Computer Associates.
Another bet I took: Mark Hamm, Inc. Leading vendor of manufacturing software in the AS-400 and UNIX camp. They were on the fence with NT Server and their president, once again a small...a very powerful software executive, Paul Margolis, that’s pretty much a visionary, was designing a new product, but he had no idea why we wanted the server business. He couldn’t see how Microsoft could make money. He kept on telling me, “Why does Microsoft want to be in the server business? Your pricing is crazy. How do you plan to make money?” So I formed, as James would love me...would want me to do, I formed this Windows ISV Enterprise Advisory Board, invited Steve Ballmer, who came, and Paul Margolis asked him the same question.. How in the world, with this pricing, do you plan to make money? Believe it or not, we changed our pricing model. If you’ll look back two years ago, you’ll notice that we used to sell NT Server with no client licensing, right? So it was too cheap. He listened. That business model was changed and now, the next generation product from Mark Hamm is called Protean. It doesn’t even support the AS-400. It only supports UNIX servers and Windows NT Servers. And this is secret, but they just closed the largest deal in the history of their company on Windows NT Servers with SQL 6, and now they want to be the first company with network OLE.
Here’s a sort of grey area. This is a company I’ve worked with in many areas for many years, and I still can’t claim real success. It’s sort of a grey area. I could call it successful; I could call it not so successful. J.D. Edwards & Company, they are the top company, the top AS-400 ISV, $200 million company, still private. They’re committed, but they don’t quite know what to do. They have a very IBM..centric sales force, and the sales force doesn’t want to deal with this Windows NT Server. However, by getting their internal commitment, I had two of their executives, one of them a founder, Bob Newman, install NT. They were so impressed with NT they adopted it internally and wiped out Novell. And as a result even when they shipped their AS-400 version of their next generation software, they’ll ship an NT Server to deploy the client side and deploy the server side of the application. They will be supporting NT server sometime during this year, or so they say they will, so it’s a funny victory. On one hajuLit’s hard to say really where they stand. But I’m sure eventually they’ll support NT Server completely.
This is another showcase for me. Leading AS-400 case tool vendor, over 80% market share. This tool is used to produce hundreds of high-performance, reliable business applications. I managed to get through to their president. Their president was an ex-IBM guy, interestingly enough same last name, didn’t believe they should do NT Server. And I got through to this guy big time. The problem that SignOn has is that with their new tool they still have to support terminals, and they had limited resources, so they asked for a deal with Microsoft—and this is secret—but yesterday Roger Heinen had just a degree...just signed a contract for us to get the Obsidian tool producing Windows NT
applications. This is an agreement...I give Morris Beton a lot of credit for driving this to completion. I started it, he finished it. The deal will be a bombshell in the midrange community. Once people know about this deal, it’s sort of all over in the AS-400 space. Everyone’s going to want to support NT Server. But most interestingly, this is a business application model-based tool that will support BackOffice logo apps and use OLE. So if you buy Obsidian from the SignOn Company, it’ll be available next fall...this fall, you will be able to use that tool to create BackOffice logoed apps that use SQL Server with fully normalized tables that generate highly efficient C++ code and actually use OLE. And that will bring over hundreds of apps. We call these feeder IS Vs. And I love ISVs like that, because if you nail one of these ISVs, and Doug says, “Well, Goldberg, how many applications are you responsible for?” I say, “Well, SignOn has one application, but their tool has generated 700.” Of course, Doug’ll go, “Well, those don’t count” But they do count. The fact is they really do count, because that’s what people buy, and they run their flower shops, their garages, they run their export businesses, they run construction projects. These are very, very important companies. Another one is V-Marig with their Universe Pick-compatible product that Tim McCaffrey has worked with me on.
Here’s one....here’s a loss. Here’s one that I just don’t know what to think of. Software 2000, another leading AS-400 vendor. They have a...they always gave us a wonderful commitment. They even issued press releases. The commitment was there; everything was there except for one thing. No software. No delivery. You just couldn’t get anything out of them, and unfortunately in enterprise companies, and in some companies
where relationship evangelism fails, or when you have a CEO that’s a visionary like Bob Pemberton, believes in your platform like Bob Pemberton. but doesn’t run the company with an iron hand, and everyone under him opposes that direction, and that’s exactly what happened. The...Recently they literally fired their old team. All the old people are gone. They have a new team in place, and they are in the process of converting to Windows NT Server, but at this point all I can say is, someday. It just hasn’t happened, folks! So I have to them a loss, and I actually don’t work with them any more.
Here’s another one that was a loss. Lawson Software. They were an early supporter. They did an early port. They showed up at Comdex. They were supposed to ship early last year, and then suddenly they backed off. They said no, no commitment from...why? There was no commitment from a top person, and H-P and IBM didn’t support Windows NT Server. That was a big deal to them. Unless you have H-P fully committed to Windows NT Server or IBM fully committed to NT Server, we can’t do our software on your platform. And then suddenly I get a phone call. Customer demand. They’ve decided to move into the health care as their focus, and customer demand changed their mind. They hired a bunch of new developers for the project, and as soon as I heard that I flew out there. I went out with some other Microsoft people, and now suddenly they have their product in beta and they’ll be delivering during the first half of 1996. The reason this was possible, I believe, is because the people at Lawson, who even though they knew I was angry about what happened and I was not a happy camper, I knew they had their reasons, and they always knew they could pick up the phone and call me. They always knew that there was still a bridge there, and if they called me and conditions
changed, that I wasn’t going to hold it against them. And I didn’t. And now they will ship on Windows NT Server. Their software is in beta.
So if I can say a quick summary, be personal, get to know the people you’re dealing with. Become part of their lives and they’ll keep you in theirs. And remember, courtesy counts. And the biggest factor that you have going for you is, you have enormous impact. Anything you say, people may bet their business on. That’s why when we tell companies how to program to a particular model, or what programs to support that come out of the developer relations group, use your own judgement and make sure that the advice you give them really gives them good advice, because they will bet their business, their careers and their fortunes, on your advice. And to be on the winning side of that equation is the most wonderful feeling. When you visit a company and they tell you, we just made the biggest sale of our company’s history on your platform, they look at you and at that point their feeling is, you’re responsible. And it makes you even more powerful. So this is self.feeding. Success does nothing but breed more success, and as
you have more successes, the job gets better and better. Any questions? Yes.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: When you go to an account in New Zealand, which is quite a large IBM kind of house. ___________ they’re on the R6000, the guy CEO. he sees himself as another Bill Gates for New Zealand.
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: That’s another...just like another Microsoft, you meet a lot of CEOs that think they’re another Bill Gates.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: He’s originally...I mean, he is successful, he does have a lot of ______ there. And trying to understand from your side how do I deal with him?
I met him once, but I’ve met more openly with the VP, and his personal kind of consultant-manager, business manager he’s called, which is kind of a youngish guy in his twenties. So I’m trying to get to him, but one of the things I was going to ask you: Do you use a lot of, with all respect, your age when you deal with them?
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: I don’t think my age hurts. I was with Digital Equipment for eight years, although people that know me pretty well know that I’m pretty crazy in outlook. But...yeah, no, I don’t think my age hurts in the enterprise space. Having a little grey hair, being a little older, it doesn’t hurt at all. But..
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: I’m trying to relate to him, and it’s a bit hard, because there’s quite a difference between us. I mean, I’m not young myself, but..
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: You look young to me!
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: So how can I approach this guy? It’s very hard to get to him ____________ Because basically the company has two components. One of them, which is where the VP I know ______________________ but that’s only 10% of their business. The rest business is fully IBM and I’m trying to shill them towards NT, but I have to talk to him because he is ______________
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: You have to get into his office. Another thing you can do is, if someone...if a DRG person from the States is over in New Zealand, or someone from Microsoft...Find out what the Microsoft execs’ schedules are, and try to get into the president’s office with a Microsoft exec. And have the Microsoft exec pitch the change in the industry, because the thing that’s killing the RS6000, besides IBM never making a penny on RS6000s, is the whole commoditization of the underlying platforms of the technologies. And the companies that follow us—IDG, I believe, estimated next year we’ll create a ten billion dollar follow-on industry that will be bigger than our own. Our BSD will reach a billion dollars this year. The industry that follows it will do ten. So there’s good business arguments, but it’s the nature of the change in the industry; but you should get into his office, but use a Microsoft exec. If you have one handy, use one.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: Can you help me with that? Because Steve Parland(?) is1 coming to New Zealand in a few weeks’ time.
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: You certainly can give it a try. You can call up his office. You can send him mail. You can do what I do, it’s called...something your mother might have done. I don’t know whether...Does everyone know what the word nag means, NAG? Yes.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER It’s an interesting question, because I’m also intellectual _________________ We don’t have as easy a list that the resources like bringing in
Steve Ballmer, bringing in some people from headquarters, things like that. We don’t have that, in the same...It’s interesting to hear your suggestions on...
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: Well, the other thing to do, even if someone...and this is almost, there’s a word for it, affectation, which is sort of, almost like a put-on or...but you have Tim McCaffrey, who’s in London and has obviously worked in Redmond for many years, and you can give him a title. He’s free to take any title you want, right? And you can use him as another person for Microsoft that’s connected to the corporation and use him in that role if you don’t have an exec handy. We’re always on a fine line between working with executives and telling them where...we have, too, a lot of power or not enough. Sometimes if people think you have a lot of power it can be difficult. Bill Anderson is perfect, perfect Bill Anderson...he speaks very, very well. He gives excellent presentations, he’s very friendly. He knows how to dress very well in a suit. Use Bill Anderson. Don’t be shy. That’s a super suggestion.
DIFFERENT SPEAKER: He knows all the upper execs pretty well, too.
MARSHALL GOLDBERG: And he knows a lot of the execs. You know Bill, he’s a good person. If I’m passing through, if Tim’s passing through...but the fact is, as I say, as an evangelist we’re considered strategic resources, and we do have relationships with a lot of the execs. Paul Maritz invited me to go out to him with Wang in early December, and I did. So that immediately makes the ISV thing...well, this guy has Paul Maritz’s ear. Well, I can. I can send him mail, or even Bill. They listen to us, because we are very.
very, very important to the success of the company. Microsoft is built on a foundation of developers. So the developer support, creating those applications that makes Microsoft what it is today. Our applications are wonderful, but you can’t run a business with Word or Excel or PowerPoint. There’s something else that’s necessary in order to run a business or to perform a function, and that’s where all the third parties come in. So we live and die on our developer community, and everyone knows it. All the execs know it. So they give us very special status and they give us very special access.
But it’s not just them. It’s you, too. It’s like James, everything James says is true. You have more power than you-can imagine to get things done and to do things. It’s one of the wonderful things about the job. Any other questions? Well, thank you all very much.