Employee no 5 at the Microsoft Swiss subsidiary 1990

I’m proud to be part of the Microsoft Journey and want to share some of my very early experiences I had at Microsoft Switzerland. 

I started my Microsoft journey on 1 July 1990 as a systems engineer for databases and networks.

My employment contract was fax based and after 5 years I had to ask for a physical paper contract as the fax was unreadable and yellowed.

I met my colleagues Peter Blum, Dorothy Kohl, Kurt Isler and Günter Weimar at the airport one month before the official start to attend the Microsoft Germany company meeting in Hamburg.

The first day at Microsoft Spreitenbach was spent assembling the furniture and laying the telephone and network cables.

Bill Gates visited our sub to present the "Information at your fingertips" vision to selected Swiss corporate customers. We used four different Windows alpha builds to demonstrate Windows 3.1 with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to show the embedding of voice or video into a Word document.

Side note: Bill Gates arrived at the airport wearing a wool jumper and rubber boots and security wouldn't let him through until Peter Blum intervened.

I received my first stock option as a physical certificate because I didn't have a share account at the time. I put the certificate in a frame on my living room wall. After 8 years I found out that it was worth more than CHF 38k.

In November 1992, I made my worst forecast ever, budgeting only 3,000 Microsoft Access packages for the launch. After 3 months we sold over 30k packages and were affecting the supply of physical discs.

We decided to send an Access pin to every customer who could not get the package before x-mas. This affected postal delivery before Christmas as the pins blocked the postal sorting system.

Together with Peter Blum we did a "mea culpa" visit to PTT management, which turned out to be a joint launch of Windows and Office, including a modem-enabled telephone set with telebanking and directory, targeting 1,6 customer direct mail.

Our first developer conference for 300 attendees at Digital in Dübendorf exceeded our expectations with over 1,300 invitations and generated CHF 30k from the distribution of betas on CD. The challenge was how to book the conference revenue into our booking system.

In August 1995, we launched Internet Explorer with a huge party attended by over 5,000 people at Zurich's main railway station, complete with a giant laser show and aerialists. The event was designed to be a grand celebration, showcasing the new browser with impressive multimedia displays. For a free product!

By the way, our team has been working more or less 20 hours a day for the last 3 days to be ready in time for the event. The last demo piece on video was delivered just 5 minutes before it appeared on the big screen in the main hall.

That's my memories form the very early stages of my Microsoft Journey and looking forward to meet you at the Microsoft Innovation Hub Switzerland.