Georg Petschnigg learned a lot during an 10-year career at Microsoft, where he worked on various consumer products such as PowerPoint and Microsoft Courier. He also got an inside look at how the tech giant integrated various acquisitions of companies including Visio, Danger, and Nokia.
We caught up with Petschnigg to get his take on Microsoft’s bid for TikTok, its new Surface Duo device, and more. Petschnigg left Microsoft in 2011 to help launch FiftyThree, best known for developing the popular drawing app Paper and presentation tool Paste. File-sharing company WeTransfer acquired Paper and Paste in 2018, expanding the company’s reach into creative tools. Petschnigg is now chief innovation officer at WeTransfer.
What was your initial reaction to Microsoft’s pursuit of TikTok?
My first thought was that a Microsoft acquisition of TikTok makes total sense when you think about Microsoft’s business and history. Microsoft has put significant muscle and resources into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and invested hundreds of millions over the years in building out Microsoft Research. These investments have paid off in many ways, like with Azure Cognitive Services and Cortana, but Microsoft doesn’t have a great AI-based vehicle for entertainment.
The beauty of TikTok is that it combines content distribution to a large audience with technical, media and user interface inventions with ML at the core. These are all areas that Microsoft has experimented with, but hasn’t truly put together in a compelling end-to-end manner for consumers. In this way Tik Tok defines a new paradigm for software which Microsoft wants to be part of.
If Microsoft does indeed acquire part of TikTok’s operations, how do you expect the company to handle it? Will it follow similar acquisitions in the past or be different?
Microsoft has gotten smarter in handling acquisitions over the years, especially when it comes to integrating tools or apps into their broader ecosystem. I saw many acquisitions at Microsoft and incorporated key learnings when Paper and Paste, the creative/productivity apps I developed at FiftyThree, were acquired by WeTransfer in 2018.
A good model here is the acquisition of Accompli which became Outlook for Mobile or Bungie (developers of Halo). The leadership of those teams were empowered to drive cultural change within Microsoft. Accompli helped Microsoft understand mobile development for iOS and Android. Bungie brought in AAA gaming DNA. With TikTok, Microsoft could accelerate the embrace of ML at the core of software development. That said, TikTok would probably remain a standalone app vs. being integrated into the larger Microsoft suite.
What are the biggest upsides or opportunities to Microsoft acquiring TikTok? And what about downsides or challenges?
There’s enormous opportunity to interpret content within videos. TikTok has perfected a blend of entertainment and machine learning – every time you watch a video, TikTok interprets your micro-interactions (scrolls, dwells, taps) to determine the next video to show you and keep you entertained.
Microsoft’s entertainment business has primarily focused on gaming and they haven’t developed any entertainment apps for consumers. With TikTok, they acquire a partner to extend consumer reach with a really powerful AI core.
An acquisition also means that Microsoft draws a spotlight to itself around data collection, a conversation that, by and large, they’ve managed to address better than say Google or Facebook, but certainly will draw them into a geo-political fray.
You say TikTok is Cortana for entertainment. What do you mean by that?
Up until now digital assistants like Alexa or Siri just never had a good answer if you would ask them “show me an entertaining video.” Often even the jokes it tells are canned. However, showing you entertaining videos is what TikTok is really good at doing — that’s what made me think TikTok could be Microsoft’s Cortana for entertainment.
It’s not a coincidence that TikTok has surged in popularity; the developers created a really powerful and compelling blend of machine learning that gives people content they want to see, and a simple UX that keeps people in the app. When people use TikTok for the first time, it understands their gender, region, age, and content interests. No other app does this so quickly and easily. TikTok also goes against the grain of most media or social apps that require you to choose categories of interest (Pinterest), rate films (Netflix), or follow people (Facebook) before you get to see content.
You led the incubation for Microsoft Courier. What are your thoughts on the Surface Duo? Do you think Microsoft will be able to establish a new form factor?
I have so many thoughts here, but in short, yes, I think Microsoft will establish the Duo as a new form factor. It will go further than that. It will define Microsoft’s take on mobile productivity and creativity.
The core insight for Courier, and the dual screen design, came from Abigail Sellen’s research in the “Myth of the Paperless Office.” She shared that the fold, two pages side-by-side, are integral to cognitive tasks such as comparing, organizing, sorting – the building blocks of making sense of digital work. Single screen solutions on mobile just do not feel right. The screen is either too small, or in the case of the iPad side-by-side still feels wonky. With Courier we saw the power of the form factor, and the foldable design means you get twice the screen.
Microsoft is very serious about this idea and embraced it. The fact that Microsoft is shipping this device with Android shows that they are putting the user experience first and technology ambitions second. Keep in mind that Ballmer canceled Courier over concerns that it would not fit in the One Windows strategy. Times have really changed.
Lastly I wouldn’t be surprised if Google and Microsoft invest in a new app store based on Android for the Surface Duo. I can see a new ecosystem of applications for productivity and creativity emerging around this form factor.
