All the cool conversation is on no-code tools these days, but the OG no-code platform has been around for 35 years: Microsoft Excel. Even from its early days, it had all the hallmarks of today’s no-code tools: a combo of flexibility, forgiveness, and raw power to wrap your hands around data, and to scale your skill level in parallel with the complexity of your output. Excel was one of the first great democratizers of the computer as an assistive building environment, taking the process of building software from requiring low-level code to visual abstraction. Like all great tools for builders,...
Steven Sinofsky is writing a book on his time at Microsoft and the rise of the PC. He joined Microsoft during its ascendancy in 1989, starting as a software engineer and moving up to leading product on Office for most of his time with the company.
So far the first few parts of the book are excellent, as expected. Sinofsky was instrumental in so many of Microsoft’s key product businesses. He’s written so much great stuff on his blog over the years.
I’m eating up each chapter as he puts them up. Here’s a great...
Microsoft’s Project Natick is exploring the feasibility of underwater datacenters. They sunk a container with 864 servers off the coast of the Orkney Islands.
So far they’ve seen reliability numbers that best the same configuration of servers on land in a standard datacenter, which is amazing for an airtight chamber untouched physically for months.
Ben Thompson published this piece a few weeks back on the state of Slack up against its competitive market for chat and collaboration, namely Microsoft’s Teams product. It covers the history well, dating back to Microsoft’s 2016 announcement of Teams, through to their traction, scale, and eventually overtaking of Slack in daily users on their platform.
We’re a Slack shop like many, but I’ve used Teams to join in on calls and it’s gotten darn good from what I can tell. The devil is, of course, in the details. I use Slack for hours a day and it’s become so second-nature...
I love this story about Access and how it’s still hanging on with a sizable user base after almost a decade of neglect by its parent. It goes to show you that there are still gaps in the market for software being filled by 10 year-stale applications. Getting users to unlearn behaviors is much harder than giving them an Airtable, Webflow, or Fulcrum — too much comfort and muscle memory to overcome.
Its long lifespan can be attributed to how it services the power user, as well as how simple it is to create a relational database with so few...
One of my favorite tech figures, a16z’s Steven Sinofsky, gives a history of “Clippy”, the helpful anthropomorphic office supply from Microsoft Office. As the product leader of the Office group in the 90s, he gives some interesting background to how Clippy came to be. I found most fascinating the time machine look back at what personal computing was like back then — how different it was to develop a software product in a world of boxed software.
Everyone makes fun...
Seems silly, but this kind of thing is great for the open source movement. There’s still an enormous amount of tech out there built at big companies that creates little competitive or legal risk by being open. Non-core tools and libraries (meaning not core to the business differentiation) are perfect candidates to be open to the community. Check it on GitHub.
An Inside Intercom interview with investor...