In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the monarch divides up the kingdom by naming two of his daughters to rule.
In the contemporary Microsoft Kingdom the parallels are rife. A hypermodern reprisal has taken place in Redmond along the very same lines.
King Ballmer has named two of his “corporate offspring,” two of his corporate “daughters” as it were, to oversee the future of the Windows platform.
By noble decree, Julie Larson-Green now leads all Windows software and hardware engineering, and Tami Reller, the current Microsoft CFO and CMO, will manage the business of Windows. Like Apple, Microsoft has consolidated enormous power and responsibility in a few, select top “actors.” Long live King Ballmer’s unanimous power including, mostly, the policy of putting capable women in charge!
Julie Larson-Green is neither an outlier nor an overnight sensation. Since 1993, Larson-Green has worked on or led some of the most successful products for Microsoft, including the user experiences for early versions of Internet Explorer, and helped drive the thinking behind the refresh of the user experience for Microsoft Office. For Windows 7 and Windows 8 she was responsible for program management, user interface design and research, as well as development of all international releases. She has a master’s degree in software engineering from Seattle University and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Western Washington University.
At Microsoft, user experience became her passion. She has overseen the successful launch of Microsoft operating system, Windows 7. In 1997, she joined the Office team. She led UI design for Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007, as seen in her official Microsoft biography.
Back in 2008, by revamping the interface of Microsoft Office 2007, Larson-Green effected a paradigm shift in one of the company’s most successful products.
A specialist in user-interface design, Larson-Green began working with Office in 1997, when she program-managed FrontPage. She subsequently helmed UI design for Office XP and Office 2003, which had evolved into a large organization of carefully negotiated compromises among the application suite’s various programs. Although Office’s great success was based on customer familiarity, the Customer Experience Improvement Program was indicating that users, while basically happy with the product, were increasingly either unaware of (possibly redundant) functions among Office’s different programs or frustrated by the amount of training necessary to use an astonishingly complex set of commands, dialogs, and interaction modes
“At first, no one wanted to change Office dramatically,” said Larson-Green, who was tasked with overseeing a reimagining of the product’s end-user interaction and overall experience in the fall of 2003. Larson-Green’s leadership of Microsoft Office 2007’s redesign, the most radical revamp in the product’s history, required immense courage and conviction.
After deciding that Office needed to be made easier to use, Larson-Green’s team arrived at the elegant solution of the browsable Ribbon (or Office Fluent user interface) and its contextual cousins that united the product’s common capabilities and ease of experimentation. “The breakthrough,” Larson-Green says, “arrived with contextualizing the user interface and realizing that all of the product’s features didn’t have to be present all the time.”
As development of Office 2007 proceeded, Larson-Green was confronted with the equally formidable task of selling the redesign across Office’s various programs. “Our biggest challenge,” she says, “was convincing people that we had an idea that would work.” Heavily invested in the earlier version, the Word, Excel, Outlook, and other organizations were initially reluctant to relegate control to an umbrella design team. Even more significant, Larson-Green had decided not to compromise the integrity of Office 2007 with the safety net of a “classic mode.”
It’s difficult to change the direction of a large organization at the best of times. It’s even more difficult when the goal is still incomplete. Larson-Green’s ability to argue her vision without necessarily being able to address myriad objections in detail is a remarkable trait in a data-driven culture such as Microsoft’s. One by one, however, the suite’s principals bought into the design as it was being tested and fleshed out.
Office 2007 shipped to nearly universal critical acclaim in January 2007, and Larson-Green was promoted to corporate vice president of program management for the Windows Experience. As with Office 2007, she plans to identify and solve customer problems, which will in turn drive a new design and its subsequent engineering. “In the old world,” she notes, “coding would start and design would kind of evolve with the coding.”
Back to our “Shakespearean” analogy, King Ballmer’s decree was as follows: “Leading Windows engineering is an incredible challenge and opportunity, and as I looked at the technical and business skills required to continue our Windows trajectory — great communication skills, a proven ability to work across product groups, strong design, deep technical expertise, and a history of anticipating and meeting customer needs — it was clear to me that Julie is the best possible person for this job, and I’m excited to have her in this role,” Ballmer said.
In King Lear, the King is revealed to be an empty vessel that is ultimately overcome by his heirs (or heiresses.) We say “Long Live Windows,” under the very best of Microsoft leadership! [24×7]
