The Adult in the Room in Microsoft’s Early Days

Says Bill Gates: Pretty early in our work, Steve Ballmer and said, God, wish we had guys like Mike Maples here’

- CHRIS KORNELIS

When Mike Maples called his team together for his first all-hands meeting at Microsoft, his new employees had their eye rolls ready.

He wasn't one of them, and they knew it. He wore ties and came from stodgy International Business Machines. Microsoft looked like a college campus, with the average employee under the age of 30. He wasn't just over 40; he had a wife and kids and was a bona fide grown-up.

It was just what Microsoft needed in 1988. The company had talent, products and a strategy. But that wasn't enough.

"Pretty early in our work, Steve Ballmer and I said, 'God, I wish we had guys like Mike Maples here," Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder, recalled. "We knew we needed adults to help who thought about management."

Histories of industry and technology tend to celebrate founders, inventors and chief executives. Maples, who died Jan. 9 at the age of 82, was none of the above. He didn't drive strategy or introduce revolutionary products. He managed. Along with Ballmer and then-president Jon Shirley, he structured Microsoft so that it could grow into the world's most dominant software company.

"In terms of our engineering teams," Gates said, "Mike was the adult who came in and listened to our 'software factory' stuff [and] managed to make it real."

No prescription necessary

At the all-hands meeting, his employees' fears were realized when they saw that Maples's final bullet point read "dress code." But their impression of their new boss was shattered when they saw him grin. He was kidding. He didn't want to change the way they dressed any more than he wanted to change the products they built. He was there to work with the people, products and culture that were in place and to arrange things so that the rapidly growing company would grow in the right direction.