About this episode
Supported by Our Partners • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sinch — Connect with customers at every step of their journey. • Modal — The cloud platform for building AI applications. — How has Microsoft changed since its founding in 1975, especially in how it builds tools for developers? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer , I sit down with Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI at Microsoft. Scott has been with the company for 28 years. He built the first prototype of ASP.NET , led the Windows Phone team, led up Azure, and helped shape many of Microsoft’s most important developer platforms. We talk about Microsoft’s journey from building early dev tools to becoming a top cloud provider—and how it actively worked to win back and grow its developer base. In this episode, we cover: • Microsoft’s early years building developer tools • Why Visual Basic faced resistance from devs back in the day: even though it simplified development at the time • How .NET helped bring a new generation of server-side developers into Microsoft’s ecosystem • Why Windows Phone didn’t succeed • The 90s Microsoft dev stack: docs, debuggers, and more • How Microsoft Azure went from being the #7 cloud provider to the #2 spot today • Why Microsoft created VS Code • How VS Code and open source led to the acquisition of GitHub • What Scott’s excited about in the future of developer tools and AI • And much more! — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (02:25) Microsoft’s early years building developer tools (06:15) How Microsoft’s developer tools helped Windows succeed (08:00) Microsoft’s first tools were built to allow less technically savvy people to build things (11:00) A case for embracing the technology that’s coming (14:11) Why Microsoft built Visual Studio and .NET (19:54) Steve Ballmer’s speech about .NET (22:04) The origins of C# and Anders Hejlsberg’s impact on Microsoft (25:29) The 90’s Microsoft stack, including documentation, debuggers, and more (30:17) How productivity has changed over the past 10 years (32:50) Why Gergely was a fan of Windows Phone—and Scott’s thoughts on why it didn’t last (36:43) Lessons from working on (and fixing) Azure under Satya Nadella (42:50) Codeplex and the acquisition of GitHub (48:52) 2014: Three bold projects to win the hearts of developers (55:40) What Scott’s excited about in new developer tools and cloud computing (59:50) Why Scott thinks AI will enhance productivity but create more engineering jobs — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future • Microsoft’s developer tools roots • Why are Cloud Development Environments spiking in popularity, now? • Engineering career paths at Big Tech and scaleups • How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman — See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/ . For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe