Jeffrey Snover

Today, I'm going to talk to you about three things. First, how transitions can affect your career, the role transitions have played in my career, and then the transition that I think is the largest transition the people in this room will see in their lifetime, and that's this idea of digital transformation. My goal is to help you get this kind of key dynamic in focus so that you can leverage it to supercharge your career.

I'm Jeffrey Snover, technical fellow at Microsoft. I'm the chief architect of an organization now called Azure Storage, Media, and Cloud Edge. I'm also known as the inventor of PowerShell and the chief architect for Windows Server. I work at Microsoft. Our mission here, we have 120,000 employees. We've got over $90 billion a year in revenue, and our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

I hope this talk will give you the tools so that you can achieve more with your career.

01Transitions and Career Leverage

Now, first, I'd like to do a survey. How many of you have heard of and believe in this hype of digital transformation? Please raise your hands and then keep them up. How many of you are planning to retire in the next three years? Keep your hands up. Okay. Well, if your hand's down, you should pay attention to this talk. Okay? Now, there are two types of jobs. Things I call stair jobs. These are the things we all know well, right? You get on, you join a company.

There's a set of things you got to achieve. You achieve those things. You say, "Hey, where's my next promotion?" They say, "Not yet." And you say, "Why not?" And they say, "Well..." And you just got to walk up the stair year after year after year. But every now and again, there's a disruption, and during these periods of disruption, they are periods of opportunity, and things don't happen as usual. And during these periods of disruption, there are new winners and there are new losers.

And the point is that if you figure this out and you play things correctly, you can have what I call an elevator job. An elevator job is where you get on the elevator and you're able to go up one, two, three floors, levels in your career in fairly short order. Okay? And so this is an exciting thing. Now, the point I want to make is that these transitions can be the wind in your sail. If you're prepared, you see it coming, and you set your sail right, when this transition happens, it puts wind in your sails and you can zoom.

But if you're not prepared, things can go badly.

02Who Moves the Business Forward

Now, you've probably heard of Facebook. Now it turns out there was a Facebook before Facebook, and I found out about this Facebook when I took my family to a vacation in SeaWorld a number of years ago, and all of a sudden, I heard this loud booming voice, "Hey, Jeffrey!" And I look, and it's Steve Ballmer. And Steve Ballmer was there with his family, and he spotted me out in the crowd and says, "Hey, Jeffrey." And he comes over and we're talking, we have this nice exchange, and afterwards I was like, "Well, how did that happen?

What the heck?" And somebody said, "Oh, that's because you're in his Facebook." I said, "His Facebook? What are you talking about?" He said, "Well, Steve has a Facebook. Next to his bed, he's got a three-ring binder, and there's a page for everyone in the key people moving the company forward, and it's got your face, a picture, and it's got a list of the things you're working on and your background. And every night he goes through his Facebook looking at all the people that are moving his business forward."

I said, "Wow, that's very interesting. I had no idea." Now, the point of that was that was what allowed me-- Steve Ballmer had somehow identified me as one of the key people moving his business forward, and so he was able to pick out my face in a crowd at a crowded SeaWorld. That, I'd tell you, made an impression on me. Now, as a technical fellow, I get to participate, along with a number of other executives, in the evaluation conversations of many of the senior people at the company.

Those conversations go like this: Who are the key people that are moving our business forward? Where are they? How are they doing? Are they happy? What do we need to do to make sure that they are happy, they stay in their job, and they continue seeing their future aligned with ours? And we compensate them. We compensate them very, very well. But here's the thing. Just like every one of you in this room, we have a budget, and when we compensate these people who are moving our business forward very, very well, guess what?

It comes from the people who aren't moving the business forward, okay? Because we have a budget. So guess what? You want to be one of those people who are moving the business forward. Now here, I hopefully pointed out how transitions, the whole point about transitions are transitions are changes, okay? There's changes, and basically, you change from what was making your business successful to what is making your business successful.

And just because you've been doing great doesn't mean that you will be doing great. And so you want to figure out who are the people that are moving the business forward, not who are the people who were moving the business forward.

03Transitions in My Career

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the role transitions have played in my career. They played a huge role in my career. I started off as a Unix developer. That picture is oddly accurate. It's not me, but it could have well been me. I wore a pair of pants like that for about six years. So I got a job at Digital, where I was doing my stair job, right? Doing these things year after year, doing okay, fine. At some point, Digital got involved in NT.

NT started to make its presence known on the marketplace, and Digital decided this was important. Man, when that happened, I got all in on this transition to NT. And the reason why is I could see it happening, right? I saw the key dynamic. The key dynamic was now production quality operating system running combined with PC economics. I looked at those two things and said, "That's it. That's the killer," and went all in.

By all in, I mean all in, right? I read everything. I evangelized. I went all in. This was not a period of work-life balance for me, okay? I went all in on this, convinced all these organizations what they needed to do, how to take advantage of this. In fact, I was even the first guest author at a Microsoft MSDN journal. And then an opportunity came. Digital decided to partner with IBM to port NetView to NT. And when they did that, they reached out to me because I was such a big advocate of NT and was established as the subject matter expert, and they said, "Would you please lead this effort?" I did that, and things just took off. This was my elevator job. Because in a matter of a few years, all of a sudden my career advanced and I became a consulting engineer. Now, a consulting engineer at Digital is a pretty big deal, right? These are people like Dave fricking Cutler, Bill fricking Laing.

I mean, just amazing. Digital consulting engineers really have sort of the reputation of being the engineer's engineer. Just really a source of a respected group of people. In fact, an amazing number of Turing Award winners have been Digital consulting engineers. So this was just a fantastic opportunity because I was able to ride a transition. Now, the industry was also undergoing a transition at this time. The shift to NT was really the harbinger of the shift of the industry from a vertically integrated industry, where companies like DEC and IBM and others built the chips, the operating system, the software, did the servicing, et cetera, to a more horizontally aligned industry, where Intel built the chips, Intel and Motorola. Anyway, horizontal. The interesting point about that is that twofold. One, the industry's moving back to a vertically aligned industry, and number two, Digital did not survive this larger transition to a horizontally integrated industry. So in fact, it was Bill Gates. Bill Gates said that most people misunderstand the decline and fall of Digital.

He said a lot of people think it had to do with marketing and the PC. That's not it. The real problem was that they were excellent at something that no longer mattered. Digital was excellent at something that no longer mattered. There was a transition, and they were on the wrong side of that transition. So there's a lesson for all of us here. When there is this transition, being at the top of your game, if it's a game that no longer matters, will not protect you.

You've got to be great at something that matters. Okay. As they were declining, they were selling off everything. Digital decided to sell their management business to Computer Associates. I met with Charles Wang, decided he was insane, and decided not to do that. Instead, I called up his competitor, Tivoli. I said, "Hey, why don't you hire me? I'll bring my product and my team, and we'll go compete against this guy." They thought, "Who the heck is this guy?" And checked it out, and that's what we did.

And for many years, I ran IBM's network management business. That went well until one day the CTO of Tivoli asked me out to lunch. We had a nice barbecue meal, and he said, "Jeffrey, you are one of my hardest working, most brightest people." And I said, "Okay, sounds good." I sense a but here, and there was. And he said, "But you're working on something that every time I sell it, I earn $20,000. You're not working on the product that every time I sell it, I earn $2 to $20 million.

So Jeffrey, I have just one question for you. Do you want to be relevant?" Wow. I had what I think the alcoholics call a moment of clarity. I mean, I was on the top of my game. This is a technology that I was passionate about, and I was leading it, and I was rocking it, man. I was nailing it, but I was earning them $20,000 every sale, and I was not being relevant, okay? So at that point, I decided to change. I did decide that being relevant and mattering did matter to me, so I made the transition.

That worked out very well. Worked out well for them, worked out well for me.

04The PowerShell and Large Datacenter Transition

I became a pretty high-profile person and got on this guy's radar screen. This guy was in the middle of trying to produce Windows Server, transition from a PC to an enterprise operating system. This was at a time the defining user experience of the PC was something we call the Blue Screen of Death. Okay? So the idea that you were actually going to run enterprise software and server software on this was, really, most people in the industry, I was one of those, who sort of laughed at this idea. Then they knocked on my door and said, "Hey, we need you. We need you to come help us with our management."

And so eventually, after a series of conversations, I decided that I would help them because of the opportunity for impact. Now, at the time, Microsoft was all about the GUI. GUI, GUI, GUI. And the reason for this was that was what they were good at. Okay? And so what they had got in their head was, if we can make this about the GUI, we can win, so let's make it about the GUI. And that was great, except I looked at this and I saw there's going to be a transition to large data centers.

And when you run a large data center, having these individual GUIs is not the way to do it. You needed something else. You needed automation. You needed command line automation. And so I wrote what I call the Monad Manifesto. The Monad Manifesto articulated the need, the approach, and this is ultimately the foundation of the architecture of what became Windows PowerShell. This document was very good. It was very clear, helped people understand exactly what I was trying to achieve.

Now, you might have seen this Microsoft org chart. This is an old org chart. Bill Gates had sponsored my hiring, and I came in as an industry executive. And when I made clear what we needed to do around this automation and command line interface, I was demoted. True story. Basically, they said, "What are you doing? What are you talking about? It's all about the GUI, and you want to go do this stuff. You can do that, but it doesn't matter, so we're not going to let you keep that job if you want to do this."

But I knew. I had fire in the belly. I knew that this was the right thing, that a transition was coming, that this was critical. And so I took that demotion and worked on PowerShell. Now, you might have heard of this operating system called Windows Vista. Not our finest moment. Not our finest moment. Now, everyone laughs, so I assume you understand what that means. But here's the thing a lot of people don't remember. What they don't remember is Windows Vista was the save. It was the save. The save from what?

The save from Windows Longhorn. Bill had been trying to engineer a transition to .NET. .NET, .NET, .NET. He told everyone, "You got to do .NET." And everyone just sort of mindlessly, like, "Okay, Bill says we got to do .NET, let's do .NET." And then they went and did a number of sort of really bad, dumb engineering decisions. You had a group of people trying to put .NET in the kernel. Doesn't belong in the kernel. We had a group of people who replaced the common dialog box. Now, just to put that in focus, Notepad, very light, quick. You say open, takes about 15K of working set, but then you'd say save as, and this common dialog box using managed code would come up.

It would take about two minutes before it came up, and you went from 15K to 20 megabytes. Just a terrible engineering decision. Well, guess what? That was a disaster, right? A disaster. And that's why we had to have the reset, because it didn't work. And when this happened, boy, the long knives came out for .NET, right? .NET bad, .NET bad. Not like, boy, I made some bad calls with .NET, or boy, I'm not as good an engineer as I thought I was. No, must be that bad technology.

And so basically the Windows organization said, "Hey, .NET's fine for you application guys, but it is not in the operating system." The problem with that was PowerShell was all based upon .NET, okay? So they produced these seven rules if anyone wanted to bring .NET into Windows. Now let me just be clear with you. With their heads and their hearts in the right place, these seven rules were explicitly designed to make sure .NET never got into Windows.

Clearly they didn't say that, but that was the explicit goal because these were incredibly draconian rules, incredibly hard things to do, and the result was everyone abandoned .NET. Everyone abandoned .NET. Everybody except one idiot, and that was me. I continued with that and I pulled PowerShell out of the operating system, developed it on the side, and I said, "Hey, when I get these seven things done, I'll figure out a way to get them done.

I'm going to knock on that door again and we're coming in." This was a very dark period. Very dark period. I had one executive say, "Jeffrey, why are you wasting your time? Admins don't want command line interfaces." And I said, "What did you do before you came to work at Microsoft?" He said, "Well, I came here straight from college." I said, "Yeah, that was pretty obvious." I had another executive bring me aside and he just very angrily said, "Jeffrey, exactly what part of effing Windows is confusing you?" I'm telling you, this was a dark, dark period.

For about two or three years, they really, really made our lives miserable. What did I do? I reached out and found the coalition of the willing. The Exchange guys were all in on .NET, and so this was a benefit to them. And together we, again, used a document. We wrote a white paper talking about how Exchange and PowerShell finally got the administration model right. And so when we do these reviews and the Windows guys would try and kill us, I'd bring my Exchange buddies to the meeting, and the Exchange guys would just sit quietly as I got beaten for an hour or hour and a half. At the end, they'd say, "What are you talking about?

My multi-billion dollar business is dependent on this, so just shut up." And that held the day. So having a coalition of the willing, especially when they're big, big help. Finally, we got ready. We had gotten the seven rules right. For each one, people would say, "Hey, we got it." And I said, "Well, show me this." They said, "We're green." I said, "Green. Okay, let me see. No, no, no. That's not good enough. You got to understand, they don't want us in, so green's not good. We got to be greener than green. I got to nail it.

Everything's got to be an 11, so bring it there." Finally, we got all of them, 11 on all of them, knocked on the door and said, "Hey, we're bringing PowerShell and .NET into Windows." Turns out there are eight rules in using .NET and Windows. Eighth rule, no .NET and Windows. You don't get to learn this rule until you get through the first seven. True story. I'm not making this up. However, at the time, this idea of the transition to large data centers, a number of executives had gotten this in focus and had understood the role of PowerShell in achieving that. And so the Windows Server executive basically said, "No, we're going to do this," and that held the day. So we shipped PowerShell.

Hoo-ha. That was a good day. That's me. Very close to me. I became a hero for having shipped PowerShell, all good stuff. At some point, I got my promotion back, yay. At an executive retreat shortly after this, one of the executives took me aside and he said, "Man, you were a pariah for years." And I said, "Yeah, it was pretty tough." He says, "We were rooting for you." I said, "Really?" Because I didn't know that. So here's the thing. If you ever see somebody struggling like that, please just be a human, reach out and tell them.

It would've been very helpful to have known that, and I didn't. I was on my own. So the point of this is back to this who's moving your business forward. For years, took me five years to get my stripe back. For five years, when the executives got together and they said, "Who's moving our business forward? Where am I going to allocate my rewards budget?" My name did not come up in that conversation. So this journey cost me a lot of money. It was painful, and it cost me a lot of money.

But it was the right play. I had set my sails right, and it took a while before this transition to the large data center became clear for everyone else. But when it did, my sail caught the wind, and I did very well. I was promoted to distinguished engineer and asked to become the chief architect, not only of System Center, but of Windows Server. Windows fricking Server. Now, let me be clear about this. Chief Architect of Windows Server, that's what you put on your tombstone.

Like on the front of the tombstone says that. On the back, oh yeah, also like father and husband, whatever. Seriously. Now, just to put this in focus, Microsoft has only had three chief architects of Windows Server, Dave fricking Cutler, Bill fricking Laing, and myself. So it's a big deal, and I feel rarefied air. I feel very grateful. I don't know how I got on this list, but I'm on it. I'm going to own it. Again, did that job pretty well and became a technical fellow.

My joke is, technical fellow, I can never be promoted again, because it is the top of the technical ladder. So the point I want to make here is that transitions have been very good to me. Okay?

05Digital Transformation

Now let's talk about these transitions. When there is a transition, there's a new set of winners and a new set of losers, and these transitions don't always go the way you think, and they don't always go the timing that you think they're going to happen. But if you prepare and you do well, you can decide which of these you're going to be. Okay? You have a choice in this. Now let's talk about what I think is the largest transition we will see in our careers, and that is this transition of digital transformation. To get this in focus, Marc Andreessen wrote an article, "Software Eats the World," in 2011.

He made two arguments. Number one, software is eating traditional businesses. He talked about things like ads being done by Google, music being done by iTunes, Spotify, et cetera. So traditional businesses that were being replaced by software businesses. And for businesses that would not be replaced by software businesses, think cars, that the value of those products, that software would be more and more of a component of the value chain of that product.

So car's a great example. Today, the average car has somewhere between 10 and 100 million lines of code in them, 100 million lines of code for the more luxury cars, 10 million for the more budget cars. It's doing all sorts of stuff, navigation, safety, infotainment, et cetera. The value of a car is more and more software year after year. He said every company needed to assume that their industry, a software revolution was coming. This is a list of the largest companies by market value in 2017.

The highlighted ones are businesses whose value is primarily derived from software. Wow. This is that list in 2011. The highlighted ones are those whose value is primarily driven by software. So Andreessen writes this in 2011, nobody in the top 10 is driven by software. Six years later, more than 50%. He was absolutely accurate. This digital transformation is real. It's important. Even these companies, a number of these companies were on that list.

I did not highlight them as software companies, but they see it. They're establishing offices in Silicon Valley. They see their threats coming from software companies. They're trying to become software companies. Now, at LinkedIn, we get to see where the job postings are. There are more developer job postings outside of tech than inside of tech.

06Core, Context, and the Other Moore's Law

This transition is real. You might have heard of Moore's law, foundation of our industry. I'm telling you that there is another Moore's law. This Moore's law is more important for the next 20 years of our business than the previous Moore's law was for the past 20 years. What is this other Moore's law? By the way, Geoffrey Moore, and he basically said every business participates in two activities, core activities and context. Core activities are those things you invest in because they differentiate you from your competitors, allow you to charge a premium. Context is everything else.

Mission critical means that there's another dimension, and that's mission-critical and not. Mission-critical means you can't screw up. You want to be focusing all of your time and energy and career on these mission-critical core activities, but there's also context mission-critical, and here's where you want to manage this. You want to be aware of this and manage it because it can suck you in and hold you down. How you end up here is at some point, you're core mission-critical, and you're rocking it, but the market will respond. The market respond with substitution, with additional offerings. At some point, you'll lose your edge.

It's still mission-critical because you still make a whole lot of money from it, but you are not able to charge premium value. So a lot of people get stuck here investing at a time when they should be transitioning, still paying attention to what made them well versus what will make them great. And this is what's called the killing fields of once-great companies.

07Create Bandwidth and Invest in Innovation

So how do you succeed with this? The companies that succeed at digital transformation are those that can create bandwidth out of what they do and then invest that in innovation. How do you create bandwidth? The answer is you apply the other Moore's law. What you do is for existing stuff, you go and you use software as a service. Now, look, here's a great example of mission-critical by context, mail. Right? Your businesses, I guarantee you, would not do well if mail did not work for a month.

Okay? But is there anybody here who really thinks that they can charge a premium for their products because they run mail better than the competitors? No, you'd be an idiot to think that. You don't. So this is mission-critical, but it's context. It doesn't differentiate you. You should just write a check and have someone run mail for you. That costs you money, but it frees up your people, so you can free up your people to focus in on the things that differentiate you. Having created bandwidth, you then want to invest that in innovation.

In innovation, the way you do that is you invest in modern cloud architectures. Look, there's lots of them out there. Pick your favorite. You don't have to use mine. Don't go reproduce the past. You do that, you're messing up. You set up virtual machines with registry keys and INF files and blah, blah, blah. No. You do new stuff. You take the time, learn the new architectures. The point of these new architectures is this.

They allow you to spend more of your time and your energy and your attention on delivering customer value. Right? This whole thing about digital transformation is about listening to the customer, responding to the customer as quickly as possible. So what does this do? This shifts IT spend. Look, most of us know most of IT is spent just keeping the lights on. They keep the lights on, and what we want to do is we want to shift that from keeping the lights on.

By the way, when you're just keeping the lights on, the conversation is, how can you do more with less? Hey, that's great. Can you do it with 70% of the budget? Can you do it with 65%? Can you do it with 60% of the budget? You want to shift this so that the bulk of our IT is spent in core. Now, that's a completely different world. Look, if I go to you and I say, "For every dollar you can spend, you can earn $10," you don't come back to me and say, "Can I spend $0.70?"

Right? That makes no sense. You say, "Oh, can I spend $2? Can I spend $20? Can I mortgage my house and get in on this deal?" Right? Shifting from core to context changes our lives and makes it better.

08Starts, Stops, and Career Advice

So the heart of this digital transformation really is this. You want to build the things that differentiate you. You want to buy the things that don't. Build the things that differentiate you. Buy the things that don't. This transition, again, one of the largest I think we will ever see, requires new heroes. This is not going to happen by itself. Not all companies are going to survive. Not all people are going to survive.

But a bunch of companies are going to thrive, and a bunch of new people are going to thrive. I encourage you to be one of those heroes. Here's how you do it. A set of stops and a set of starts. Stop just clicking next. If you're just clicking next on a GUI and not automating, you are not adding any value. You need to automate to create bandwidth, and you need automate to ensure and lock in your innovation. You need to stop crafting no value-add solutions. Leverage software as a service so it frees up your talent.

Stop building snowflake servers and snowflake clouds. Use DevOps and develop best practices. Stop leveraging these old low-leverage architectures. Pick up the new architectures. They really are great and allow you to focus in on the customer. And by the way, those can work on premises as well as in the cloud. Now, here's the reality. Reality is that uncomfortable is the new normal. I am uncomfortable every single day of my life.

We just did this PowerShell thing, did Windows Server thing, then did Azure Stack thing, and then I got reorganized, and now I've got all of Azure storage. Oh, my lord, that's incredible. One of the largest geo-planetary scale services we've ever seen, and I'm responsible for that. And just as I'm barely beginning to get my head around that, there's a reorganization, and I picked up media as well. It's like, whoa. Every day is uncomfortable. It is the new normal. Get used to it.

If you're not uncomfortable, you're probably not doing it right. Push through that. Lastly, stop dialing it in. Invest in your careers. The fact that you're here means that you're doing that. Keep doing it after this conference. Invest in your career. The point is there are these transitions, and when you see the wind starting to go, if you set your sail right, you can catch the wind and you can take off. And if you don't, bad things can happen.

And remember, when it comes time to evaluation, we take a look at who are the key people moving our business forward, not who were the key people who made us what we are today, but who are the people who are going to secure our future. You want to be one of these people. You want to push through the uncomfortableness, be the hero for your corporation, and prosper. My name is Jeffrey Snover. Thank you very much for your time.