00:00:02

Today I'm gonna talk to you about three things. First, the role, 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 Sno, 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.

00:01:04

I hope this talk will give you the tools so that you can achieve more with your career. 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 hands 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? <laugh>, you get on, you join a, a company, you, there's a set of things you gotta achieve. You achieve those things. You say, Hey, where's my next promotion? They say, not yet. And you say, why not? And you say, well, you know what? And you just gotta walk up the stair year after year, after year.

00:01:57

But every now and again, there's a disruption. And during these periods of disruption, they are periods of opportunity. And, uh, 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, uh, 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 1, 2, 3 floors, uh, levels in your career in fairly short order. Okay? And so this is an exciting thing. Now, the point I wanna 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, <laugh>, things can go badly.

00:03:00

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, uh, 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 Bomber. And Steve Bomber was there with his family. And he spotted me 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? You know, what the heck? You know? 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, and you know, next to his bed, he's got a three ring binder and there's a page for everyone in the, the key people moving the company forward.

00:03:51

And it's got your face a picture, and it's got a list of the things you're working on in your background. And every night he goes through his Facebook looking at all the people that are moving his business forward. So, wow, that's interesting. I had no idea. Now, the point of that was that was what allowed me, Steve Balmer 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 sea world 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?

00:04:41

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, you know, 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 wanna 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 wanna figure out who are the people that are moving the business forward? Not who are the people who were being the bus moving the business forward. So I'm gonna 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, <laugh>.

00:06:13

That picture is oddly accurate. It's not me, but it could have well been me. I had, I wore a pair of pants like that for about six years, uh, <laugh>. Um, so I, uh, got a job at digital where I was doing my stair job, right? Doing these things year after year, doing okay, fine, fine, fine. At some point, digital got involved in NT NT started to make its, uh, uh, 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. I said, that's it, that's the killer. And went all in. By all in, I mean, all in, I read everything I evangelized, I went all in.

00:07:15

Just, uh, this was not a period of work life balance for me, okay? I went all in on this, um, convinced all these organizations what they needed to do, how to take advantage of this. Uh, in fact, I was even the first, uh, guest, uh, author at a Microsoft, uh, MSDN journal. Um, 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, a big advocate of NT and, 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. 'cause in a matter of a few years, all of a sudden, I, uh, my career advanced and I became a consulting engineer. Now, consulting engineer at digital is a pretty big deal, right?

00:08:14

The, these are people like, you know, Dave Frick, Cutler, bill fricken Lang, uh, in fact, <laugh>, I mean, just amazing, you know, digital consulting engineers really have a sort of the reputation of being the engineer's engineer, you know, just really a, a source of, of a respected group of people. In fact, a an amazing number of touring 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 Dak 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 and Intel and Motorola. Anyway, horizontal, the interesting point about that is that twofold.

00:09:18

One, the industry's moving back to a hor, a vertically aligned industry. And number two, digital did not survive this larger transition to a hor horizontally, um, uh, 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 gotta be great at something that matters. Okay?

00:10:25

As they were declining, they were selling off everything. Digital decided to sell their management business to computer associates. I met with Charles Wong, decided he was insane, and decided not to do that. Instead, I called up his competitor and I said, 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, uh, checked it out. And that's what we did. And for many years, I ran, uh, 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, you know, brightest people. And, uh, I said, okay, sounds good. He said, I, I sense a, but here and there was. And he said, but you are working on something that every time I sell it, I earn $20,000.

00:11:28

You're not working on the product that every time I sell it, I earn two to $20 million. So Jeffrey, I have just one question for you. Do you want to be relevant? Wow. Wow. I had what I think the alcoholics call a moment of clarity. <laugh>, 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 time sale, and I was not being relevant, okay? So at that point, I decided to change. Uh, I did, decided that being relevant and mattering did matter to me. So I made the transition, uh, that worked out very well, uh, worked out well for them, worked out well for me. Uh, I got, became pretty high profile person and got on this guy's radar screen.

00:12:25

This guy was in the middle of trying to produce Windows server transition from a PC to a 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 gonna run enterprise software and server software on this was, it was really most people in the industry. I was one of those who, who sort of laughed at this idea. Then they knocked at my door and said, Hey, we need you. Uh, 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 a time, Microsoft was all about the gooey, gooey, gooey, gooey. And the reason for this was that was what they were good at, okay?

00:13:16

And so what they had got in their head was, if we can make this about the gooey, we can win. So let's make it about the gooey. And that was great, except I looked at this and I saw there's gonna 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, very good, is very clear. Helped people understand exactly what I was trying to achieve. Now, you might have seen this Microsoft org chart, <laugh>, right?

00:14:12

This is an old org chart. Bill Gates had, uh, sponsored, uh, my hiring. And I came in as an industry executive. And when I made it clear what we needed to do around this automation and command line interface, uh, I was demoted <laugh>. True story. Uh, basically they said, what are you doing? What are you talking about? It's all about the gui and you wanna go do this stuff? I mean, you can do that, but it doesn't matter. So we're not gonna, we're not gonna let you keep that job if you wanna 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 <laugh>.

00:15:03

Now every, everyone laughs. So I assume you understand that 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, dot net, dot net.net. And he told everyone, you gotta do.net. And everyone just sort of mindlessly like, okay, bill says we gotta do T net, let's do t 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 T net in, the kernel doesn't belong in the kernel. We had a group of people who, who, who replaced the common dialogue box, not just to put that in focus, you know, notepad very light quick. You say Open takes about 15 k of working set, but then you'd say save as, and, and this common dialogue box using managed code would come up, it would take about two minutes before it came up.

00:16:02

And you went from 15 K to like 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. 'cause it didn't work. Excuse me, it didn't work. And when this happened, boy, the long knives came out for T net, right? T net bad, T net bad, not like, boy, I made some bad calls with T net, or boy, I'm not as good an engineer as I thought I was. No, it must be that bad technology. And so basically the Windows organization said, Hey, T 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 T net, okay? So they said they produced these seven rules. If anyone wanted to bring T 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 T Net never got into Windows.

00:17:02

I mean, they really, no, that was the, that was clearly they didn't say that, but that was the explicit goal because these were incredibly draconian, uh, uh, rules, incredibly hard things to do. And the result was everyone abandoned T net, everyone abandoned.net, everybody except one idiot <laugh>. 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 'em done. I'm gonna knock on that door again and we're coming in. This was a very dark period, very dark period <laugh>. I had, I had one executive say, Jeffrey, what are you wasting your time? Admins don't want command line interfaces. And I said, you know, 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. <laugh>, <laugh>.

00:18:05

I had another executive bring me aside. And he just like, very angrily said, Jeffrey, exactly what part of effing windows is confusing you. I'm telling you, this was a dark, dark period. And for about two or three years, they really, really made our lives miserable. But what did I do? I reached out and found the coalition of the willing, the exchange guys were all in on T net. And so they, this was a, a benefit to them. And together we again used a document. We wrote a white paper talking about how to 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. And at the end they say, what are you talking about? I'm dependent on 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.

00:19:09

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. We're green. Say green. Okay, lemme show. Lemme see. No, no, no, that's not good enough. You gotta understand they don't want us in. So green's not good. We gotta be greener than green. I gotta nail it. Everything's gotta be an 11. So bring it there. Finally we got all of 'em, 11 on all of 'em knocked on the door and said, Hey, we're bringing PowerShell and T net into Windows.

00:19:41

<laugh>.

00:19:47

Turns out there are eight rules in bringing, using t net and Windows eighth Rule, no T net and Windows <laugh>. You don't get to learn this rule until you get through the first seven. True story. I'm not making this up. Um, however, at the time, this idea of the transition to large data centers, uh, a number of executives had gotten us in focus and had understood the role of PowerShell in achieving that. And so the Windows server executive basically said, no, we are gonna do this. And that held the day. So we shipped PowerShell hoo-ha, that was a good day. That's me. <laugh> very close to me. I became a hero for having shipped shell. All good stuff. At some point, uh, I got my, my, uh, promotion back, yay. Uh, at an executive retreat. Um, one, uh, 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? <laugh>,

00:21:03

Because I didn't know that <laugh>. So here's the thing, if you ever see somebody struggling like that, please just be a human. Reach out and tell 'em. It would've been very helpful to known that. And, 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 gonna 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 was, I did very well. I was asked to become the dis, I mean, 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, you know, whatever,

00:22:28

<laugh>.

00:22:33

Seriously, seriously. Now, just to put this in focus, Microsoft has only had three chief architects of Windows server, Dave fricking Cutler, bill Fricking Lang, and myself. So it's a big deal and I feel, you know, rarefied air, I feel very grateful. I don't know how I got on this list, but I'm on it. I'm gonna own it.

00:22:55

Um, again, did that job pretty well and became a technical fellow. My joke is a technical fellow. I can never be promoted again because it is the top of the technical ladder. So the point I wanna make here is that transitions have been very, very good to me. Okay, 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 gonna happen. But if you prepare and you do well, you can decide which of these you're gonna 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, mark Andreessen wrote a, a article software Eats the World In 2011, he made two arguments.

00:23:53

Number one, software is eating traditional businesses. He talked about things like, um, 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 a hundred million lines of code in them. A hundred million dollar line, a hundred million lines of code for the more luxury cars, 10 million for the more budget cars, software. 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 after year.

00:24:52

He said every company needed to assume that their industry was, uh, software revolution was coming. This is a list of the largest companies buy market value in 2017. The highlighted ones are businesses whose value is primarily derived from software. Wow, 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.

00:26:05

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, Jeffrey Moore. Uh, and he basically said, every business participates in two activities, core activities and context. Core activities of those things you invest in because they differentiate you from your competitors, allow you to charge a premium. Context is everything else. Mission critical is means that you can't, there's another dimension and that's mission critical and not mission critical means you can't screw up. You wanna 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 wanna manage this.

00:27:01

You wanna be aware of this and manage it 'cause it can suck you in and hold you down. How you end up here is at some point your core mission critical and you're rocking it. But the market will respond. The market will respond with substitution, with uh, uh, uh, additional offerings. At some point you'll lose your edge. It's still mission critical 'cause you still make a whole lot of money from it, but you are not able to achieve, you aren't not able to charge, uh, 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. Uh, and this is what's called the killing fields of one's great companies. So how do you succeed with this? The companies in that succeed at digital transformation are those that can create bandwidth out of what they do and then invest that in innovation.

00:27:57

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, uh, use software as a service. Software as a service. Now look, here's a great example of mission critical, but 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 their 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.

00:28:49

You then wanna invest that in innovation. In innovation. The way you do that is you invest in modern cloud architectures. Look, there's lots of 'em out there. Pick your favorite. You don't have to use mine, but you want to. Don't go reproduce the past. You do that. You're messing up, you set up I virtual machines with registry keys and INF files and co blah blah, blah. No, it was, you do new stuff, you foc 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.

00:29:49

They keep the lights on. And what we wanna do is we wanna shift that from keeping the lights on. By the way, when you're just keeping the lights on, the conversation is how can I, 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 wanna shift this so that the bulk of our it is spent in core? You? 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 70 cents? Right? That's, that makes no sense. You say, oh, can I spend $2? Can I spend $20? Can I spend, can I mortgage my house and get in on this deal? Right? So you wanna shifting from core to context changes our lives and makes it better.

00:30:37

So the heart of this digital transformation really is this. You wanna build the things that differentiate you. You wanna 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 gonna happen by itself. Not all companies are gonna survive. Not all people are gonna survive, but a bunch of companies are gonna thrive and a bunch of new people are gonna 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 gooey and not automating, you are not adding any, any value you need to automate to create bandwidth. And you need automate to ensure and lock in your innovation.

00:31:32

You need to stop crafting no value add solutions, leverage software as a service. So it tees, 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'm uncomfortable every single day of my life. Uh, as we get new, we just, I 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, you know, geo planetary scaled services we've ever seen. And I'm responsible for that.

00:32:31

And just as I'm barely beginning to get my head around that as a reorganization, and I picked up media as well, it's like what? Every day is uncomfortable. It is the new normal. Get used to it. Uh, 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, key people who made us what we are today, but who are the people who are gonna secure our future? You wanna be one of these people you want to push through the uncomfortableness, be the hero for your corporation and prosper. My name's Jeffrey Snow. Thank you very much for your time.