A Dozen Things I’ve Learned From Mike Maples Sr. About Business and Investing – 25iq
It would be difficult to overemphasize how important Mike Maples was to the success of Microsoft. Even more difficult would be trying to explain his personality which someone who knew him very well said to me “is several standard deviations away from what you would expect from a tech executive who started his career at IBM.” His personal impact on the lives, beliefs and skills of many people I know is nothing short of massive. He graduated from Oklahoma University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and earned his master of business administration at Oklahoma City University. Maples joined Microsoft on May 1, 1988. Maples was responsible for all product development and product marketing activities. By the time Maples eventually retired from Microsoft he was the executive vice president of the Worldwide Products Group and member of the Office of the President, reporting directly to Bill Gates. Maples is now an investor and rancher.
Bill Bliss: “Mike arrived from IBM and really shook things up. He created the first Apps Division Business Units (BU’s) — if memory serves: Analysis Business Unit (Excel, Pete Higgins), Word Business Unit (led by Jeff Raikes), Graphics Business Unit (PowerPoint, led by Bob Gaskins, the founder of the company that created PowerPoint), Entry Business Unit (Microsoft Works, led by Susan Boeschen), and the Data Access Business Unit (Access, codenamed Omega at the time, led for a short time by the late and great Jeff Harbers). Under each of these was Development, Product Management, Test, Program Management, and User Education. There was also a small shared Tools team reporting to Mike; at the time all the Microsoft applications used a proprietary compiler and other tools.” “This organization allowed each of the products to exist as little startups within the larger organization and it was the BU organizational framework and the strong empowered leaders Mike put in charge that enabled Excel to beat Lotus, Word to beat WordPerfect, and (later) Access to beat Ashton-Tate. Strategy and execution were pushed all the way down into the organization; without that, the products never could have scaled the way they did.”
