0.11 From here to infinity  (Page 5/9)

I was struck too by the mixture of confidence and exuberant uncertainty in the kids around the table. They spoke briskly and efficiently, with proper corporate determination to keep moving forward in line with their strategic vision, and they displayed the impatience of people who knew they were on the right track and wanted to get the meeting dispensed with as efficiently as possible. They looked like children earnestly playing at being corporate bigwigs. The impression that they were kids playing a game was heightened by their tendency to lapse into childlike hesitancy whenever—as was often the case—they were suddenly confronted with a question they couldn’t answer. One minute, you would hear a young woman say, “I envision this to be something that’s extremely deep, and not just deep in the sense that there’s a lot of content in one area.” Then when someone would ask her to explain what she meant, she would say, “Um….”

The group was charged with having to define a completely new product, design it, make sure it would work properly on a near-infinite array of personal computer brands and configurations, make a business case for it, get Gates’s endorsement, then get it developed, marketed and out the door in 18 months. Theirs would have been a difficult task even in a well-defined market with a history to guide them. To create and dominate an entirely new market was a far more daunting challenge—particularly for people with as little experience as these people had.

Bartholomew, who had spent several previous years overseeing production of Microsoft’s first version of Encarta , had at least some experience in conceiving of and designing for a multimedia CD-ROM market. And three of the people in this meeting had worked for him on that project. But none of them had any idea at all about how to design a children’s product. They had looked at children’s computer games and children’s encyclopedia books, and decided from that cursory research that they knew they wanted to create something informative that had a game-like element to it, so that kids could enjoy navigating around in it as much for sheer pleasure as from the desire to find information. Beyond that, they seemed helpless, adrift, vacillating constantly between bluster and fear. One minute Carolyn Bjerke, who had designed the user interface for Encarta and would be leading the interface-design team for this project, would be saying, “We always blow competition away”; the next, she would be fearful that Disney would suddenly enter the multimedia business and blow Microsoft away. They could compete with Disney on technology, at least for a time; but could they ever compete in aesthetics or content? One moment Sara Fox, a young woman who had studied early childhood development at Stanford, then worked for Broderbund Software, a children’s educational software company, before coming to Microsoft as an editorial lead for children’s titles, would say confidently, “We just have to make a plan and get done what we need to do”; the next, she would wonder if anything they were planning was feasible.