Marc McDonald - Microsoft's First Employee | scobleizer

charlieM

Fantatic stuff. I wonder how many MS employees there are now?

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

About 60,000.

PocketXP
More Cowbell

Great interview!

That one deserves an Emmy.

Cool to see that he designed the FAT file data structures back in the days of 8" floppies.

Does he know the famous "Mark Z" from the EXE file format?

fyi: The first 2 bytes of a DOS/Windows EXE file are ascii MZ.
MZ are the initals of the Microsoft programmer (Mark Z-something) that developed the EXE binary format.

jkipk

Great stuff, Scoble. What's best about this is that the most interesting bits of the interview are not "what was Bill like back then", but Marc's excitement about what he's doing now, and how much better he wants software to be. An honest healthy open assessment of not so much how far MS has come, but how big the potential is for it to go so much further. His views on the customer, and on stepping away from code in order to get to developing great software are classic. Again, great interview.

McDonald

Sure I know Z. He came on after we were back up in Seattle for a couple of years. He's a comparitive newbie except he stayed at MS while I left.

sriram_2001
Sriram Krishnan

The Z stands for Zbikowski Smiley

McDonald

Consider the MZ in the EXE format one of Microsoft's firts Easter eggs.

LarryOsterman

McDonald wrote:
Sure I know Z. He came on after we were back up in Seattle for a couple of years. He's a comparitive newbie except he stayed at MS while I left.

And Gee, I started in '84 Smiley

Btw, ran into Jim Lane in the airport a couple of weeks ago, he's doing well (although I think he's even taller than he was when I last saw him). He's working at another startup doing something with embedded stuff.

BenZila

Great interview.

I love the interviews like this, where you just get a person who has a lot to say and just let him 'go on' you get alot of intresting stuff out of it.

I would have to say i'm in Marc's style of thinking, make something around the user and don't worry about features unless it adds something really valuable to the experience. And also his thinking about other peoples ideas that are good.

And made me think about the iPod shuffle aswell, and a great bit about giving credit due where credit is due, I think alot of people inside and outside of Microsoft forget that.