Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Sasha Pasulka

I knew I wanted to meet Monica Harrington as soon as I heard her name. I first came across it while reading about Intersect, the top-secret Seattle startup that can’t stop creating buzz. Monica was listed as the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. “No one even knows what this company does,” I thought to myself, “and it’s already being brilliantly marketed. Who is this woman?”

I discovered that Monica has a near-perfect record in marketing. She was an integral member of the Microsoft Word team that displaced the seemingly impenetrable WordPerfect. She was the Chief Marketing Officer of Valve, the creators of the wildly successful Half-Life. She later spent two years as the Senior Policy Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, advising the Gates directly. She left to become Chief Marketing Officer at Picnik, the online photo-editing company acquired by Google in March of this year. In April, Monica joined the Intersect team.

I couldn’t wait to pick her brain, and I wasn’t disappointed. There’s plenty to discuss, so this will be a two-part piece. Today’s segment focuses on the revolutionary marketing approach the Microsoft Word team used to displace WordPerfect during the transition to graphical computing in the late ‘80s. Next week’s will focus on how these marketing strategies can be applied in a startup context.

The Power of a Platform Shift

In 1987, WordPerfect owned the word processing market, and Lotus owned the spreadsheet market. Word had a miniscule market share, but the market was in flux. The days of the text-based editors were ending as graphic interfaces inched onto the scene.

“Any time there’s a platform shift,” Monica tells me, “there’s huge opportunity. And oftentimes the people who are most vulnerable during a platform shift are the entrenched leaders.

“Lotus and WordPerfect thought they owned those markets, so they were complacent. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma. They didn’t want to move [from character-based] into graphical. In the DOS-based world, they were the leaders. So why would you want to go through this transformation? They were reluctant. And Microsoft was aggressive.“

Monica found herself uniquely positioned to be part of the team that won this battle for Microsoft and changed personal computing forever.

But let’s start at the beginning.

The Foreign Correspondent

Monica didn’t always intend to be a hotshot thought leader in tech; she grew up in Portland and studied journalism at the University of Oregon, planning to be a foreign correspondent. Her boyfriend was still in school when she graduated – a situation she refers to euphemistically as a “geographic constraint” – so she took a job in Portland as a technical writer at a software company called Timberline. 

At Timberline, she worked closely with developers. “They would tell me what they were trying to do,” she says, “and then we’d do a release of the build and I would write about it.”

If she couldn’t figure out how the software worked based on the screens, she worked with the developers to modify the design.

“I was actually a usability specialist – but it wasn’t called that.” 

“Oh my God, I Have to Work Here”

She fell in love with tech but realized that product management would be a better fit than technical writing. She set out to interview with tech companies.

“I planned to talk to Microsoft, Lotus and Ashton-Tate,” she says, “because they were all about the same size. I started with Microsoft, and once I went through the interviews, I thought ‘Oh my God, I have to work here.’”

I ask her why.

“There was this hum – an excitement – like everybody felt like they were working on something that was potentially going to change the world. You could pick that up. I hadn’t seen that kind of excitement – excitement tinged with confidence that we could really do it.”

In 1987, she joined the Apps group at Microsoft as a technical editor, with plans to be a product manager. “I assumed that [Microsoft] would recognize that I wanted to be a product manager and just let me do it,” she says, laughing. “But it wasn’t like that.”

Fighting for a Career Transition at Microsoft

She went through the interview process for a PM job, competing against freshly minted MBAs from the top schools in the country.

“We don’t know what to do with you,” her interviewers told her. “You did well in the interview, but you don’t have any background or training in this.”

She didn’t get the job they had open, so she took a different approach. She proposed a project to a friend who was a PM – helping Microsoft develop a mutually beneficial relationship with her former employer – and he encouraged her to move forward with it.

“I was a technical editor by day and a product manager by night,” she explains.

After eight months of working on that project, she scored another set of product management interviews, one of which was with Jeff Raikes. “I knew that if Jeff didn’t think I was a fit for marketing at Microsoft, that was the end of my marketing career there.”

Jeff offered her a job as a product manager on the Word team.

Overthrowing the Old Regime

Monica was a perfect fit for the Word team in late ‘80s, because the shift toward graphical meant personal computers could now create broader value for the average person, but only if the usability factor was high – and she’d spent her years at Timberline as a stealth usability specialist. She’d also worked with graphical computing in its very earliest days.

“A lot of people now think that the innovations in graphical computing came out of Apple,” she says, “but they didn’t.  They came out of Xerox PARC.”

Monica had worked with the Xerox Star system – the first commercial system ever to incorporate a window-based GUI – at Timberline.

“The things that made Xerox Star so powerful,” she says, “we were going to do on PCs. Apple had done it after Xerox, and Microsoft was going to do it first on OS 2 and then on Windows, and I just so strongly believed in that. It was easy for me to be an evangelist.”

She still speaks of her work at Microsoft using “we” as the pronoun, and she still speaks the word with excitement and compatriotism in her voice, and I picture a line of bonded-by-fire Roman soldiers: They stand shoulder to shoulder, shields up, marching personal computing forward together.

This is not what I hear when current Microsoft employees tell me about their jobs, but you can hear, smell and taste it in the halls of any great Startup Weekend. This is what we’re all hungry for: to be a part of something like those early days at Microsoft; for our voices to carry, twenty years later, still the excitement and creative genius of a team we loved, a team in which each member worked as a natural extension of the others, a team that could do superhuman things, like slay a Goliath.

Winning Over the Influentials

Monica saw that the overall PR effort for Word required her team to change the way the market influentials evaluated products. Reviewers at the time valued products for the length of their feature list, but, if personal computing hoped to be truly revolutionary, the focus needed to be on usability. The average person needed to be able to use personal computing tools to do his or her job better, and this person would not need to use the bells-and-whistles features that a handful of professionals might find marginally useful. 

But the spreadsheet and word processing reviewers at publications like PC Magazine and PC Computing still needed to be sold on this paradigm shift.

“You can’t overestimate how influential these people were, “ says Monica. “They determined what could even be considered as an application for corporate America.”

The team focused PR efforts on these people.

“We brought reviewers in over a two-year process and had them observe the usability work that was going on at Microsoft. It was changing the mindset. These products were going to be adopted throughout organizations, and ease of use was going to be important.”

I only need to glance at the name of the software I’m using to write this article to know how this particular war ended.

As I converse with Monica about the teams that created enormous successes for Microsoft in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I’m surprised by how many of the names that come up are female. Ruthann Lorentzen. Leslie Koch. Marianne Allison. Mary Dieli. And Melinda French — who would, in 1994, change her name to Melinda Gates, but to whom Monica still refers by her maiden name.

During a time when women were still something of a curiosity in the tech world, Microsoft was anything but an Old Boys Club. Bill Gates and his team were hiring brilliant women and putting them in leadership roles, and it was working.

Next week: Monica Harrington brings her marketing prowess to the startup world.  

Editor’s note: Monica Harrington will be speaking about marketing and branding at StartupDay.  Register early for priority advisory slots!
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