(car zooms) - It's lunch time and this is Brad Anderson's Lunch Break. (happy music) (cars driving) Here at Redmond, we're visited by some of the smartest people on the planet, pretty much every day. Every chance I get, I meet up with them for lunch. (happy upbeat music) In this episode I wrap up my in depth conversation with Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group. We were talking yesterday and you were describing how you see the role of the CIO really change into one who focuses on the culture of creativity and teamwork in an organization. - Well, certainly the modern workplace CIO's for sure. - Yeah Yeah those who are kinda ahead of the game and thinking about it, I think it's gonna be all about that culture, it's gonna be all about, You got millennials entering the work force with different expectations than you know, I guess we're not millennials, huh? (laughs) - We try to be. - Yeah so they have different expectations than people that've been in the workforce for 20 years, different tools but you want everyone to work together. To me that's a culture of question of how you want your company to work. - You were one of the pioneers on taking us to the cloud. I mean, go back to when we were working together when you were running exchange and I mean I was running systems center, you know saw this opportunity, this vision to take change to the cloud, and that's really kinda the foundation of what became Office three 65, what were you seeing then that led you to say, hey we need to go deliver this as a cloud service, that was very early. - Oh what happened there was some amazing customers began to scale of what they wanted to do with exchange. Number of devices they wanted to support, number of remotes sites they want to support, the amount of storage they wanted to manage on behalf of those users, and then compliance came in, it was complex. And it got to this place where there were just repeatable patterns across customers, and just got to this place where some, especially with medium sized businesses, there was this sort of you know, customers in this 500 to a couple thousand seats that weren't able to hire big teams with the expertise, it was like let us do it for you. We did get started with you know these few customers and then it was about learning, about listening and learning and then understanding what it would take so we could offer the same capabilities to customers all over the world. - And now you look at that and that really has been the foundation that Office three 65 was built on, which is the most commonly used cloud service enterprise period. - Yeah. I mean it's amazing. It's, - And then you did something similar when you took over Windows, I can remember hearing you for the first time describing delivering Windows as a service, you know so what patterns were you seeing there? - I think it's the same pattern of, you're listening to the customer, and you're looking for where the challenges were happening, in terms of serving these customers best, in the case of Windows we were on a three yearly cycle, and we had this disconnect where customers were asking for, they wanted to have more influence over the, more transparency more open development model, but they also just wanted be able to get bite size value. And you know that's quite a challenge, 'cause Windows is an enormous codebase. - Oh my word. - It's it might be the single biggest software project in the world of course we don't know the size of every other software project, but it's certainly the biggest software project we have at Microsoft and that we know of and the, so thinking about how do we now develop it more incrementally such that we can still go after these bold and ambitious goals, but also deliver it you know, what's now twice a year, allows us to have this ability to listen learn react to what customers want. - I think it was you look at it kinda like the history of the software industry, I think what you guys pulled off in a single release, really is one of the most amazing things that I've ever seen done in software. - I mean that's nice to say but we built on top of the work done before us in all cases. You know if you look back in Windows history, Windows seven was a fantastic release that built on some great work in Windows Vista that didn't land very well, and I think we'll look back on Windows 10 and say it really did build on some great work in Windows eight. Which you know we didn't land as well as we would've liked. You know these big platform releases with hundreds and hundreds of millions of lines of code, you got backward compatibility, you've got security you got everyone from militaries around the world to consumers depending on it to work and, - The thing's that you set that vision up that gave you the most trepidation as the leader in finally changing how Windows (laughing) I mean what were the things that gave you the most concern? - The biggest challenge is always the ecosystem. You know with Windows you're not building a product, you're building an ingredient that really encompasses the work of so many companies. (lighthearted music) - Well you know we should make this like a regular occurrence (laughter) - Alright man see you around - Thanks Terry - There are a lot of cameras in here - Alright thanks Terry - Next time on Brad Anderson's lunch break, How much seniority do you need at ABI in order to ride one of the Clydesdales? (laughter) - Let's not talk about technology - Yeah - Let's talk about capabilities and that really helps you get that seat at the table and then you can use that to innovate.
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