My very first job at Microsoft in 1992 was all about partnering. We were building Windows NT, a 32-bit operating system. But most of the backend applications that we needed to become viable had been built for Unix-based minicomputers, not Windows. And so my task as a young Windows NT technical evangelist was to move those applications onto the PC architecture. Lacking credibility as a serious enterprise player, Microsoft had to do a lot of hard work just to be considered. We built prototypes of applications for our PC platform, and then took them to customers in manufacturing, retail, and
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