a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Engineering a Revolution at Work

Episode Date: April 10, 2014

From file cabinets to typewriters, spreadsheets and word processing the tools we use for work change not only what we do, but the culture of our workplace. Steven Sinofsky, a veteran of building software tools for productivity, discusses the latest revolution in technology-enabled tools with Benedict Evans. Why today’s cloud-based tools change the role of managers, and why the perfect tool will never exist (nor would you want it to).

Hello, welcome to the A16Z podcast, or A16Z, if we want to localize this. I'm Benedict Evans. I'm here today talking with Steven Sinovsky, one of my new colleagues at Andrews and Horowitz. Steven, hello. Hi there. How's it going? Pretty good. So you spent a long time working on productivity and working out ways that people were going to work and ways that would change and how that could be taken forward over time. And you wrote a really interesting book. blog post a day or two ago looking at how devices in cloud and SaaS kind of bring a sort of generational change into how those kind of tools work. Can you talk a bit about your blog post and how you think about that? Sure. Well, you know, for me, it really just, it all starts back when I started in computing. You know, when I started in computing, I was, you know, helping to computerize. That was the word we used back then. My father's own own business. And I've seen a lot of productivity stuff over the years. My first actual paying job was a summer at a very large

defense contractor. It was the 80s, the Cold War defense contractor jobs where we all went and did in the computer world. And, you know, I showed up that first day of work. And, you know, they used this email system that we don't think of as email, but it was called profs. And it was IBM mainframe-based email. So those of you that dates you and you knew about Oliver North and the whole Ron Contra scandal. That was how they communicated was with this prof's email. And the way that managers used email was they would get mail, but they would have somebody and an assistant printed out, and then they would dictate the reply, and then they would type the reply in and send it. And so it wasn't visible at all that it was happening electronically to management. And

next to every administrative person's desk was a selectric typewriter, and the telex was the way that you quickly transmitted information. And literally that was when I started at Microsoft. That's what the average workplace looked like outside of Microsoft, where we actually used command line, Xenix-based email as a huge productivity tool. And it was right when people were starting to put office into desktops or office-like software. In fact, it was mostly DOS and things like that. And those tools were used essentially to automate that style of work. And so, even like business writing memos and spreadsheets themselves were sort of done in this analog fashion where somebody would have ideas and then give them to another person to execute with some

computers and then print them out and distribute them. And what happened through the years that I ended up was lucky enough to work on productivity software was that whole process became democratized and everybody participated. I mean, I remember, you know, that when we finally started seeing companies where people in executive and senior management would do their own email. You know, it was this huge, turns out that was a huge productivity win because there wasn't these human routers in the middle, you know, basically printing and handing. And it's days of showing up in an office with a stack of printouts that were just mail messages ended.

And so now we've got this, we got to this world where these tools were democratized. And it didn't just make things more efficient. It also defined a work culture. And so the whole idea of getting slides ready for a meeting, you know, the bigger the meeting or the more important the executives were in a meeting, the more time you spent up front preparing and sort of debugging those slides. And the tools got created to support that process, like sort of a fascinating thing where like if aligning every item on the slide by a pixel perfect thing was a big deal, then all of a sudden features would get created and UI would get surfaced and that would become part of the task. And we optimize that dramatically. We created new modules of software. We went and built an enterprise scale server so that documents could be shared in the server.

And that sort of gets us to where almost everybody is today. And it's a fascinating place, except for this generational change that's happening right now, where all of a sudden everybody's showing up to the meeting with a phone and or a tablet. You know, maybe in addition to their laptop, but those phones and tablets are changing the whole flow of what's going on. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, my, say, my first experience of business computing communications was scribbling on the back of telex stack, tractor paper stacks that my father brought home from his general electric company plant,

making very big pieces of electrical equipment in the UK. And then I arrived in the workplace in 98 or 99. So that was the heyday of office and Windows NT4. And my amazing transformative SaaS product was Bloomberg. which is still like the biggest SaaS and social network and information visualization platform that nobody in the Valley has ever seen which is kind of a fascinating other conversation

is like the only people who can disrupt Bloomberg people who've never seen it and have no idea what you use it for but then there's a kind of as you say it's like I think to my time working in big companies the kind of the PowerPoint Excel paradigm so much of what's done with it is not what anybody in Excel would have is not what Dan, the guy who created...

Dan Bricklew, which would have thought you do with it. You see Excel used as a desktop publishing program. You see it used as a substitute for an SQL database. You see PowerPoint used as an internal business reporting tool. A note-taking tool. Or not-taking tool. Exactly. And so you see these products being bent,

which is kind of a tribute to their flexibility, but it also then points to opportunities and coming at what you say from the other end, opportunity to create new kind of products that peel away some of those use cases. So it seems to me that on the one hand you have a lot of uses, particularly of Excel, that should be a SaaS.

Or you've used, you know, my friends at NBC Universal or Orange or whatever, part of your weekly or monthly routine is you spend a day making a 15 slide PowerPoint full of business metrics. You think that kind of shouldn't be what you're using Excel and PowerPoint for? Well, it's a fascinating

thing you know like I mean of course the flexibility of the tools was was you know the people just that designed them did amazing amazing work and I take no credit for having designed the tools and and it is amazing I mean you see Excel and it's used one of these eye-opening experiences I had was to find out at one point in the in the 90s that Excel was the preferred word processor in Japan because the the documents in Japan are all highly structured with grids if you ever checked into a hotel or bought a ticket or something in Japan, you see the grid. And it turns out that's just the way they prefer to have documents in that market. And as we tried to break into that market with word processing, we found out that Excel was

the word processor. And so all of a sudden, the word processor has to pick up all of those features. Yeah. I knew people, the whole banking team I worked with did all their presentations in Word. Yeah. Which is exactly the same kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, Word is...

But they were doing slides in Word rather than... Well, of course. It's interesting that bankers would do that, because generally, you know, a word processor is really just a spreadsheet with one cell. And so that's a joke. There's laughter that you're hearing, guys. We'll put that. We'll add that in our. Yeah, we'll put that in. I was just thinking, that's an interesting point.

Yeah. But what's also fascinating is a lot of where each of these modules in productivity software, part of the reason that they do all of these things, you know, you can make a table in every module of every productivity tool, tools that Microsoft makes, tools that other companies make, And part of that reason is because those tools were all created in an era where actually getting the software into somebody's computer or onto somebody's computer was of challenge. And so it was no surprise, for example, that when the original versions of Word Perfect evolved to sort of build in document management into Word Perfect. Not just because it's like a lot of people who use Word Perfect, we're also using document management in law firms and government and regulatory environments. But because if you had to go through the trouble of getting Word Perfect onto the computer and a word perfect,

world without networks or slow networks, you might as well just put everything that they might want into it. And so this is sort of this bundling that happened. Originally, interestingly enough, word processors were sold separate from spell checkers and grammar checkers and drawing programs. The old WordStar product line, one of the original DOS word processors, there was Spell Star and correct star and all of these other models. And then, but the distribution of those became so tricky, they gradually, in the competitive

dynamic, gradually caused those to join together. And then once you were going through the trouble of getting something onto a PC, you really wanted it to have everything. But today's model where everything is sort of a click away, even apps, which everybody can talk about the headaches of getting all the different apps and stuff, but the friction is very, very low. And your ability to put it on the machine, to get it off the machine is very, very easy, not just because of the store, but because things in the modern mobile architectures, like there's no registry to worry about, there's no side effects of one app messing up another app. And all of those things make it so that the try then buy or just the use the front end to the thing you purchase are way easier, which allows the productivity experience itself to sort of be unbundled in a way that makes a little bit more sense. So the Excel scenario is you see lots of word processors, you see lots of tools for making tables, you see lots of tools for interacting with like checklists and to-do lists or tools at a very rich semantic level like organizing events or organizing people or great tools like Asana that are about tax. task lists where you now can have these specialized tools and they just work for the task at hand a lot better. Yeah, I mean, there's a thing we were chatting about the other day, that if you go to file new in any

productivity program, you basically see a list of ideas for iPhone apps. You know, it's like the sports tracker, the, you know, the homework results saying, you know, the home budget. Those are all apps now. I mean, there's a, there's a thing that, again, thinking about the bundling, isn't one of the dynamics around that that historic bundling that basically the output was supposed to be a stack of pieces of paper very often and so you'd want a stack of pieces of paper with charts and diagrams and pictures and text and therefore it kind of made sense that you could do or you could do text inside a table or you could do a table inside text

depending on what the kind of the emphasis was going to be whereas now when you look at all of these sort of SaaS products they're not ever actually intended to be printed out anymore Well, in fact, that's one of the most fascinating things about just visiting all of the startups that I spend time with down here is that, like, there are no printers. Like, it's far more important to purchase a coffee machine as a startup than it would be to buy a printer. And in printers, just literally, you can't find them. Like, in fact, I tried to print out some notes for this meeting, and our printers, there's like two of them, and they're not even in very convenient places. And it's because it's just not the metaphor.

If you think about the average large kind of company meeting, even today, the vast majority of meetings are start off with somebody showing up and passing out like a printed version of a work product. You just don't see that in a company of less than a thousand people. Like that's just not a metaphor that people really use. And it's not even the interesting thing about it is it's not just that everybody got emailed the attachment for the meeting. It's that people are looking at things like live data.

So when you visit a smaller company and they're looking at their current telemetry for their app, their site, their service, they're all looking at the actual tools that are used by the marketing team to manage the information or the IT team to manage the information. They're not looking at like a snapshot from even a few hours earlier. So you don't have, you cut out all of this process called, well, those numbers aren't up to date. Let me go do them. You don't have those presentations where a picture of the numbers are embedded in the presentation and they're pivoted the wrong way. Like, if you want to sort the numbers by a different way, don't, don't like have one person do it on their laptop and then say, okay, let me plug my machine in. That always became an action item. It's like, what are those numbers? Okay, write down. Right. And you come out of a meeting where you've got 10 action items for people asking for more numbers. And whereas now, which is, well, you press the button and there they are.

Right. And I think these are the things to me that are just these huge cultural shifts in how you manage an organization. Like what your role as a manager is in a meeting is no longer to be. reported too because frankly if you want to know you should just go visit the place that everybody on the team is already using to keep track of their information and when you get everybody together it shouldn't be to argue the pros and cons of how the information was gathered or is it the right number is it the number pivoted the right way it should be we all agree this is the number is it good or bad and what should we do as an organization to change that number and to your point

all the stuff about aligning pixels and so on just goes except for you know when you're doing an external things. I mean, there's a, there's a point here about devices, I think, because there's a, you know, whenever I talk about, you know, mobile as a future, in a sort of generic sense, or generally, I'll post a chart showing sales of smartphones versus sales of PCs or a school basis smartphones versus store base of PCs. And people come, always push back and say, well, I'd like to see you do that blog post on a tablet. Yeah. I'd like to see you produce all of those charts on a tablet. And I think there's kind of two parts to this. One of them is it's a bit like saying, well, you can't get real work. People say you can't get real work done on mobile

device. It's like to say you can't get real work done on a laptop. You need a desktop because you need a big screen. And, you know, there was a point 20 years ago when that was true. And that line has kind of moved steadily of the stuff that you actually needed a desktop for was shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and now it's really only like hardcore video editing or something you need an enormous screen for. And I think tablet in particular, to some extent, smartphones, again, sort of sit in that continuum. Like, what is it that you're actually trying to do? How many of the things that you're doing need a keyboard and a mouse and a vast screen. But that then, just

to finish the point, that then flows into this question, the analogy I gave earlier of somebody doing a weekly PowerPoint reporting document. If your job is, if you are a BD person or a salesperson and once a week you have to send your head of sales a 15 page deck

outlining what's going on, then you need a keyboard and a mouse and a big screen. But you don't actually need a keyboard and a mouse in a big screen to be a BD person. And so if that's all in Salesforce or in a SaaS or in something else, then that whole workflow drops out. Therefore, the device you need drops out. Well, absolutely.

I mean, that's sort of the key. Like, if you're the sales manager, you should just be looking at Salesforce all the time or whatever tool you're using, that allows you to just see what's really going on in real time. And the process should not be a weekly summary of the past. I mean, that's just a, it's not an efficient way to run an organization when the up-to-the-minute information is available because your salesperson, as they are waiting for, you know, are waiting for the flight, the car, the plane, or just walking home from the account, they're updating it on their mobile device, what everybody, the view of everybody they're seeing.

But I would, I'm a little hesitant to go down the path of, like, how do you do X in Y? Like, how do you do this thing on a tablet? How do you do that thing on a phone? How would you ever do that thing on a notebook? I mean, how would that salesperson walking down the street fill out the up-to-date information in Salesforce using a browser in a notebook? They can't. But the logical end of being careful about that is everybody's going to have five devices, which is also not going to happen.

And so what, or even if you just say, no, it's only going to be a tablet and a laptop, or it's only going to be a phone and a laptop because I don't need a tablet, except you kind of do want a bigger screen sometimes because if you have a bigger screen, more and more tools can take over the productivity work. And really there's going to be this whole continuum. them, but at some point, like, whatever it is you define as work is also changing. And I think that's the part, whenever I get on Twitter and comments on other people's post, you get in this thing where people say, I can't do X in on a tablet or on a phone.

Yeah, and the answer is, the answer is X doesn't... Is your job to do X, or is X just a tool you're doing for some underlying challenge? But in some cases, yes, it is. If you're coding in Eclipse, you kind of want a keyboard in a big way. But most people's job is not actually to produce spreadsheets or to produce presentations. Right. It's something else

of which that is just called, or to write code. It's something else of which the thing that they think they need a keyboard or that they're using a keyboard or mouse for is actually a tool to get them that. I mean, certainly long ago like, you know, I witnessed salespeople who basically routinely would only do things that they could

accomplish on their smartphones, their early generation smartphones. And what you, what I watched happen was, you know, you know, field-engaged people gradually just stop responding to email and starting to either text or call because they just were no longer able to. There wasn't ubiquitous wireless wand for a laptop. And their laptops, they weren't carrying them to meetings. It became a burden. Now, if they had to do demos or they had to do presentations, they were carrying their laptops. And guess what? Those things now are enabled by tablets, whether it's Surface or an iPad or an Android

tablet. All of those, the form factor has allowed a different level of computing. And at the same time, which is so exciting is, it is like a revolution, almost in every sense, because the manager is sitting back at the office who has defined that work process is sometimes the least likely to be the person calling for change. And so I kind of wrote this blog post as a call to action. Like, you have, you know, it's hard. Like if your boss tells you to fill out a weekly report and very specific. I mean, believe me, I have seen every kind of mandated presentation, status report, and spreadsheet that you could imagine. Like, millions of documents we've collected when I was at Microsoft that were all about, like, you know, I remember seeing, you know,

a general in the Army requiring status reports to all be done on one slide with four quadrants with this format and no bigger than this text, no smaller than that text, no pictures. And, you know, like he is a general. Like, so he has a lot of. stuff at his disposal to compel you to do the format in that way. And you have no tools to just jump up and down and say, I object, general, sir, I'm not going to do that. And so part of what's going on is there is this bottom up change in work and it's going to take time. And there are people who are literally, I would just, I would almost say they're victims of a workflow and they don't get a vote. But there are also plenty of schools that are changing and there are plenty of people

that are changing where it is going to happen. And all of these things, when you're talking about a universe of people using a tool that's, you know, a billion plus in any of the tools. People who insist on every, like there are organizations that insist on, you have to go visit our desktop browser-based website to fill in an update and expense report. Okay, that's just another work item that got defined by the platform. And believe me, we've seen tons of companies where they're building new ways to fill out that mundane business report, which used, which for a long time became the thing you had to stack up and do only at the end of the week.

And incidentally, that was a perfect example. of an early kind of work that could never have been computerized. When I was making the rounds trying to get people to automate expense reporting, they all looked at me and said, that's why we have a selectric typewriter, because our expense reports need to be filled out in triplicate. And they have to be, the items all have to fit on these lines. And my computer doesn't fit on those lines because nobody wrote tractor-fed paper that worked. And of course, in my head, that was exactly what I did for my father's small business.

but also, right, so there is a place where the work product can change, and it takes a long time. Like there's somebody in IT and expense reporting that defined it. And then eventually I watched, even in my old job, I watched the Selectic typewriters gradually fade. But believe me, we had them all in the 90s. Like, it took a while before that they went away. And you still will have business processes that are like that. And then on top of that, there are things that are just, like, if you're a finance person and you're doing a giant model or your trading system, all those, those don't, things don't go away. And that's one of the common things is this is such an emotional debate for people. You know, you cannot take away my laptop. It defines my job, defines my work. And, you know, this is also, a huge amount of this is just also additive. You don't define the new thing as always subsuming all of the old. You know, and there are going to be breakthroughs. And I always think about these. analogies between movies and the theater.

You know, it turns out that movies would have gone away long ago had people just define movies as putting one camera in front of actors on a stage. It's a very boring way to watch a theater presentation. And but then all of a sudden someone said, oh, you know, these cameras, they can move around, they can go outside, we could use more than one, and a whole new form got created. That is actually what's happening in business right now. So it's not that you're going to look at the 15-page. status report and say how can I do a 15 page status support in this tool or look at this

giant tracking spreadsheet and say how do I redo this in a tablet what's happening is new tools the tools are now five years old you know or at the very least you know two or three years old and all of a sudden we're seeing this explosion in new approaches to the work products themselves and that's what's particularly exciting right now is that people are now there's enough experience with the form factor to say we don't have to just do it the old way, that the whole way we think about it can change. So sort of a final question, I suppose, we've gone from having a network drive with a more or less chaotic or sensible folder structure and you could put everything in the project folder and it might be Excel or Photoshop or Illustrator or any other thing

or Vizio or something. But you can kind of know where everything was. Whereas now you've got 10 cloud services and it could be in any of five of them. So we're kind of going through this phase of massive innovation and massive competition and great new companies being created. Do you think we're going to kind of narrow in a bit on a smaller set of companies? Actually, I would take a different view. And I would say it's not as much about a smaller set of companies as every time there's one of these discontinuities in technology. And I think we are because of mobile. A bunch of new tools appear.

And then it takes a little bit of time to figure out the new problems that these new tools created. And that's fine, because that's how innovation works. Like, if, you know, the enemy of the good is the perfect. And so if we all locked ourselves in a room until there was the perfect tool for doing work in a company, it would be out of date, too big, too hard to roll out, all of those things. So the only thing that we know for sure is that things are, the processes that are currently in place are essentially being disrupted by all of these new tools. And the companies that go and are forward-looking and adopt these are simply going to be more modern.

and more productive, just like the companies that were the first to do word processing and spreadsheets, were then the first to do GUI, the first to do networking, the first to use laser printers, the first to use color. I mean, these are things that come to define differentiation between organizations. And it's the speed of thought, it's the speed of decision-making, the speed of communication, the speed of working with customers. These tools that are out here are all about solving those problems. They're not problem-free.

They're going to create a new set of problems, which is then itself going to get rolled into new solutions and new ways of work. And that's just the fun part about being done here and seeing all of that stuff at play. Great. Stephen, thanks a lot. Thank you very much.