 Hey, so I'm here with Steve Konecko, who is the design director for Office, but you've actually done a lot more than that. A little bit. And we're going to talk a little bit about design here at Microsoft, talk about hardware, software, your role. My favorite topic. Your childhood. Childhood. Feelings. We're going to cover the wide range. No, but tell me what you do here, tell me what you have done at Microsoft. Okay, so I'm currently a design director in Office, been here for about six months, I say here because, well, we're on campus. And my job and our job collectively is we're delivering and designing the next generation Office, which I unfortunately can't talk much about. You can't say anything. Super excited. But software and services. Are you rethinking, is Office going to be, I know you said you can't talk about it. No, I can't talk about it. Is this going to be a whole new Office? It's a new Office. Okay. I'm going to fall in love. I think people will be really impressed. Will I finally, because I'm not an Office fan. I know this is going to. I hope you fall in love. We're working awfully hard to actually reach people's hearts and not just their minds. Is this, and I know you can't talk about it, so I won't push you on it. Sure. But I'm curious, is this something that will coincide with Windows 8? Is this a piece of the Windows 8 puzzle? I can't actually say. Okay. But I would say we are one big happy family and our goal is to create cohesive experiences across companies. Right. So that's my shorthand for it. Okay. So we won't. A different kind of an answer. I won't force you into any more Office conversation. Yeah. All right. But so tell me about what you do here and what you have done. Yeah. So I've had a long history here. I've been in the company just over 20 years now. Started as an industrial designer back in 1991. And my job is to redesign the Microsoft. Is that 20 years ago? Yeah. Wow. Microsoft Mouse. Originally designed by ID2 and Matrix. Do you remember the Dove Bar, if you go about that far? Yes. Yes. So I was a part of a team that redesigned that Dove Bar mouse to make it the ergonomic Mouse 2.0. And that led to an organization that grew to about 40, 45ish people that consisted of ergonomics, industrial design, interaction at the time, user assistance. But in that world, we actually started product lines like the Natural Keyboard, the first keyboard at the company's, the split keyboard at the company's. Was the Mouse the first piece of hardware for Microsoft? You know, Microsoft was, it wasn't the first piece of hardware. We actually did such things as cartridges for printers and other things like it. But the Mouse was the big business that we've been in for a bit. And it was a very small group. But currently, as you I think witnessed today, the hardware division is quite large. So we did everything from mice to keyboards, joysticks, force feedback. Interesting note there is everything we've done in hardware that I was doing always had a software orientation. So I think unique to Microsoft in many ways is that although I would say we were doing, I was an industrial designer, our job in hardware was to make software better, which led to different paths in my career. So after hardware, joined the Windows organization with Windows XP, was a part of the Shell team who was looking on the look and feel, some of the interaction. But my primary job there was to bridge the marketing and brand team that we brought together. You were focused on user interface. User interface, but at the time where I was entering the project, the interface was, I would say, 85% to 90% done. What wasn't done was the overall storytelling and the brand architecture simplification. The new Windows flag was part of our effort. At a time when our brand architecture and logos were getting very complex, this is the time with.NET and all those boxes around the Windows flag. They're really sending the wrong messages of everything we're trying to do in Windows. It was ultimately simplifying. When did Clippy come into existence? Clippy was, I'm not positive of that. I think it was, was it 95, 97? You didn't have anything to do with Clippy. That's Office. No, but I know the people and I won't say anything. You do. You know the Clippy folks. They're great people, yes. I saw you have some Clippy paraphernalia in the store here. Oh, we do. That's great. But now you have to really own Clippy because you're part of the Microsoft team. That's the Office team. Yeah, no, we love Clippy. In fact, we have costumes, Clippy costumes. Clippy puts on their Clippy costume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We love Clippy. I would like to see photos of that. Sorry, so you're working on XP. XP, and then in that context rolled over to what we called Longhorn at the time, which is pre-Vista. Yeah. And at the time, we had what we would say is a large hole in our experience world called hardware. At least that's the way Windows talked about it. The whole meaning that we really had no initiative to rethink from ground up what the Windows PC was all about. So built another small team. I was the founder of what we call the Hardware Innovation Team inside the Windows organization. We set it up to have system architecture, interaction design, brand, program management, product planning. Our job was effectively to manage and bridge the gap between the Intels of the world, our core software development team and all the planning scenarios that are going on, and the OEMs and IHVs. So IHVs meaning Logitech, other hardware partners who are doing input devices, as well as all the multitude of OEMs from Sony, Dell, HP, etc. And we built packages and programs to actually work with different design groups in these different OEMs to help redefine the behavior, the way that people interact with PCs, and ultimately the look and feel to actually do something really tricky, which is to create affinity between the Windows look and feel and software and what the hardware DNA was of let's say an HP versus a Dell. Very delicate trick. Yeah. You don't want to design the hardware for them, you want to kind of guide it. I could tell you we went end to end on concept PCs. We call it the Athens PC and there was another one called Shire, which was a concept PC for the Windows Home. And we did, I would say 90%, maybe more, of the interaction design of the system architecture. This is creating a chassis basically? This is actually the nuts and bolts of the logic of the machine. Everything from on off to the chassis spec to the way that music and communications, let's say you're taking an incoming call with your PC, we were working out the state or the logic between if you get an incoming call, does the music you listen to duck or completely go off? What does this do? This is the system neurology that people... What was your decision on that? It's ducking. It's ducking, didn't totally turn off. Right. So you take the call, you hit the call switch and the music shuts down and replays from where you left off. Right. But those are the types of hardware software interactions that don't happen typically because you have to be in the seat of influencing both sides. Right? And that's something as simple as, you know, they call it the transport controls and how they behave. So that was the gap. It wasn't really about trying to design Dell's PCs, but it was trying to actually redefine how a PC behaves so they're easier to use. And meanwhile, while we're at it, we were working with the Dell industrial designers to develop a language that was unique, that was prototyping this better affinity between design languages, so to speak. And you really, Microsoft still does that now. I mean, when you look at the Windows phone devices, that's a... And I know that you didn't... I mean, I don't know how much input you... I was part of that. You were part of that team, but that's a quite, you know, you've got this very specific spec set. You've got a very specific chassis that is, you know, you're not saying, here's how you design the phones, but you're giving a really very specific set of requirements for your partners. Right. And I mean, that's, to me, is like kind of this middle ground between, say, Apple style, where you control everything top to bottom, and something like Google, where it's just, you know, free for all. You guys are doing... You're trying to strike this balance, it seems like, where you want partners to do what they want to do and kind of explore their hardware pieces on their own, but then you want to play the right way with the software you're doing. You want to have a consistent... And on behalf of the end user, right, and this is back to the point of being able to specify as little as necessary to ensure a quality experience. Quality is defined by, first and foremost, the layer of what we would call reliability, security, and performance. Right. Right. And this is on-off behavior, right? Those are the types of things that operating systems and software companies need to partner with. So, processor people, you know, anyone who's developing components inside of the system, we have to have a... We want to and need to lay down some level of consistency at that level, because that makes it better for everyone. Similar to a chassis of a car, right? It doesn't necessarily mean we're designing the shell of the car, the seats, the radio, whatever it may be, and the brand on top of it. But you want to have a reliable foundation. Right. And so that, I think, is one model that the company is using. In the case of Windows and the PCs, we actually went a little further. We actually were working end-to-end on the design, quite behind the scenes, quite honestly, but that's a different partnering model, where we actually were getting involved in even material selection. Really? Yeah. Because we, you know, to a point where we actually built what we call a hardware toolkit. And our partners know about this, and we actually expose it through design competitions and whatnot. But effectively, we took the Windows software and worked our industrial design skills to actually translate software into hardware components, like the material callouts from GE plastics. Fit and finish, material spec on texture. So a clear, translucent piece of plastic had the murkiness of the Windows task pane, right? And that it had the finish, so it looked like what was being rendered in the UI. So when and if a hardware company wanted to create a translucent part, and they wanted to subtly create a level of affinity between hardware and software, why not use it? Right. Segoe as a font was offered to all of our OEMs, and still is offered from what I know. So they can put it on keyboards, right? No one really differentiates with keyboard font. And they should and can, but if they want to create a level of affinity, we license the Segoe font so that the keyboard looks and feels like the software that we're holding. Those are small examples of how to, there's a dial that obviously any partner can decide to use or not use. Right. So that's where it was at. So before Office, on the topic of design, before Office you were involved in the entertainment division, right? That's right. That's right. And so that's Xbox, Zune. Xbox, Zune, Media Center. Right. Windows Phone was a part of that division. Right. And Windows Phone, this is kind of where I want to kick off this question. Windows Phone version 7 brought a brand new kind of, well the Zune had started this a little bit, the Zune HD. Right. But Windows Phone really, you guys had this very strong design, it was a very strong, very different design concept than anything we'd seen from Microsoft. And I think a lot of people were kind of blown away. I know I was. Right. It was not what I expected. Right. And you're now taking that and it's really starting to propagate through all of the other products or a lot of the other products of Microsoft. Right. Windows 8 is. Yep. You're seeing some. This Metro or Metro style. That's right. The Xbox dashboard is looking more and more like Metro style. So how important is it to bring all that stuff together and at what point did you realize that you needed to unify or you wanted to unify? You know I think we as designers knew way before we actually executed that we did have a very mixed messages to consumers or let's call it end users. And our brand as far as the external community and end users were concerned looked very fragmented because our design languages were inconsistent. Maybe more importantly I don't think things worked as well as they're supposed to. Right. And so we internally and somewhat externally like to joke and say you know the expectation for our products to work and feel like they're part of a family have always been quite high. I like to think that right now is finally when we're delivering on that promise. So one plus one could equal more than two. So we're introducing new math at Microsoft. Scary thing in a computer science company. But I like to use it. We say one plus one equals eleven when we do what we do. And that is effectively aligning first and principle. We get that scale to interaction design so interoperability and cohesiveness. Similar conceptual models. The way you use a phone cognitively should use similar concepts of what you're using in Windows and or Xbox. That's the priority. And the look and feel also then now sends a message that you're within a certain family right. And your expectations are set. So we've always felt that was important. I think to answer your question directly it was about two years ago that I recall an event where we as many some of the design directors in charge of the different divisions. League of Design League of Design so to speak. We call it an LT leadership teams went off site for a day and a half and we actually stepped back and for the first time put up all the work using screenshots hard copies not not digital shots. And we filled a wall of 20 feet long top and bottom and tried to parse let's call it information worker from consumer. But really took a look from server and tools all the way to what's going on in some cases what's happening in MSR but Windows Xbox at the time Zoom and started to look for commonality amongst all this. And you saw an awful lot of it. But we're very disappointed in what we're seeing as well. And what a waste of development efficiency and a huge complaint from consumers as well I think. And we I know as in in in the press we had been giving Microsoft a hard time because there was this promise of reading all of you have all these pieces but they're all so disparate right. And then you've got no common real. So we did we did as a community and this wasn't anything we needed permission to do. It was always on us right. Not just design but it's program management anyone's making decisions. Shame on us for not bringing that together as well as we could have. And so we've just took it upon ourselves to say you know what we're making calls for the different divisions. It's important that we really start to develop a more unified promise and message to end users right. So at a very grassroots level at one one hand we just start to create these small working teams to actually start lining natural user interface gesture right. Certainly within our divisions even that was a challenge but across divisions even more of a challenge. And then the look and feel the metro design style and language became something where different teams were now cross pollinating right. We were sharing designers. We're talking about icons. We're sharing what palette of colors people are using and this continues today in a more formal state. But then we're just doing our job right and making the calls that were right thing for the end user. But making a comprehensive decision that would be comprehensive in the sense that the design leads with a leadership said we want the stuff to look and feel the same way we want it to work together. That's right. And that's an ongoing project right now. That's right. And so what's you know how much of that is going I mean obviously Windows 8 looks like I said is very metro style. How much of that functionality is just going to become the same functionality in the sense of you know you've got developers creating stuff for Windows 8 you've got them creating stuff for Windows Phone you've got to create stuff for Xbox. Is there is there a merger of those pieces at some point is that is it the end game or do they remain. I can't I can't I can't share specific but I think we do need to simplify our developer message without question. It makes everyone's lives better. And there are we're on that path to making things more efficient for our developers because they are first and foremost in many ways are one of our top customers right. Right. And what we as an operating system in the platform company. But you know outside of that you know we definitely do see the collaboration between design organizations and again interaction look and feel and even common scenarios as being something on our plate to ensure that we are creating a holistic story. The challenge we have however is as you see with phone and Windows 8 and what's going on in the IEB or the Xbox is the large Metro style interface designed for gross usage gross in the sense of interaction. Right not nasty. Hand control not nasty but gross and interaction touch etc. Yeah. Doesn't necessarily scale incredibly in an obvious way over to a highly dense environment. Take office visual studio or other experiences right. Maybe even Bing to a certain degree. So there is an awful lot of work to take the principles of Metro which make things fast and fluid. Priding craftsmanship trying to do more with less and things that you may have heard of and make that translate in an authentic way for different experiences that have different interaction models that have to accommodate different detailed input methods that have really dense commanding spaces and information. Right. And like offices. Like office. So you know we use the term authentically digital to describe you know if we can strip out what we call Chrome in an interface then your content becomes hero. Right. And philosophically we would love that idea. And you see it manifest in some of the products you just mentioned. Challenges Chrome actually performs a functional role too and has always. It helps us group similar tasks. Right. And create visual hierarchy right in a very dense space. Right. And it's known for kind of over Chroming in some ways. Right. You know there was just this kind of little hubbub Stephen Sanofsky posted some of the you know explorer and you guys were talking about getting around through files and folders and searching and exposing all of these pieces of Chrome that would allow you to. Right. You know ostensibly do that better but it looks very daunting to an average user right because you just want to get at the things you need to get at. Right. Quickly. So there is this battle at Microsoft because if you look at Windows phone. Right. You know you have a lot of experience. Everything goes away. You just see big text. Big images. Right. You're not it's not information dense. That's right. How I mean how do you merge this very and really you've got it's not just that it's not just that you're trying to bring that sensibility over but it's a question of how do you treat that content of that data. I mean does Office need to be as Chrome heavy as it was previously. Right. Does the does the Windows Explorer have to be as Chrome heavy as it was you know previously. The short answer is we don't think so. But it does pose some interesting and difficult challenges in that we do still have fundamentals that we have to deal with in a very dense environment. Let's say a view. Right. We still need to control what you see for a second and third at least through design principles. So now we don't have a crutch like Chrome to help us push and pull the visual. So composition layout font scaling contrast ratios all become the technique that's absolutely required. We have to up our game so to speak in solid visual design principles motion principles etc. in order to create the right level of hierarchy so that users don't get overwhelmed with too much information. Right. Because Chrome did perform a little bit of that role to help us manage what you saw for a second and third. So I think it's a fun challenge and I'm excited to share it when we're when it's time. Yeah. But you know we're not done. We've got a lot of work to do but I think it's a language and a philosophy that is very extensible to all environments. So this is something core for Microsoft as a whole is that you know let's decrome it. Let's make it. Let's simplify in a way that obviously is going to make sense for users. That's right. But you really company wide are owning this concept. I think it's exciting to people because if anything we've watched Windows and you know for me and I'll say this I'm a Mac user and I really love Windows Phone. I like what I've seen of Windows 8 the Metro piece. But then there's the other piece that's very familiar Windows and I'll admit you know it has not been that interface has always felt overly complicated to me. And the idea that you guys are owning the concept of company wide scaling that back or kind of simplifying it to make sense for obviously for different scenarios is exciting. And you're serious about that. Very serious about it. And I take you at your word. No I mean yes very serious about it. Myself and a bunch of others many others in the design community as near as even last week had a day where we went off site and we actually talked about all the levels and details of what we just described and reinforced this commitment that it's important that we practice and learn from each other so that it really does is something that sticks. Ultimately it's the right thing for the business because it's the right thing for users. And we want this is the this is the challenge we have. We strip out the extraneous details. The risk is that we look boring. And how do you manage motion and gradients so you don't see a gradient but you feel it. One is a motion non-existent because you didn't even know it happened but it reinforced function. This is where we're going and this is the level of craft that we have to up our game to because stripping all that out comes at a risk if we don't execute it really well. But ultimately it's your content right. And content and information is getting denser and denser. And we believe the way only way to scale in the future is to prepare ourselves to strip out things strip ourselves out of the equation so that what you're feeling and seeing and using is all about you. It's not about us. And that's that's the long pole. If we went down a path of being too concerned about surfacing ourselves in that equation there's no room for you. And there's already too much noise in the equation. So I and the design community and Microsoft are committed to this. We still again have a challenge of how does it scale into different environments different different interaction models. But philosophically no one's batting an eye. Is this a is this a different Microsoft than it was 10 years ago when you've been here 20 years. I think you know it's it's in many ways it's certainly different in in the I think the confidence of design design at a collective level. And it's because it's not no longer just about designers or researchers. I think the organizations are becoming more design oriented. So there's a collective confidence that we can talk about aesthetics like this. And it's not a foreign language that we have to box up and only use with in special crowds. We can have this kind of conversation at the executive level where there were more receptive and understanding of what we're talking about. And in fact very much ways in many ways supporting and pushing us to do more. And the other side is there is a even in the 20 years this is still the same Microsoft. The good parts of it. Say it's a super it can be an intense but you're working with super smart people right that all want to do the right thing. We just have to funnel ourselves and really focus on communications and doing the right thing and take the noise out of the system and really deliver the way that Metro is trying to deliver by filtering out again things that are not necessary and only things that matter. And that happens at a larger scale. And I think those two things in combination maybe make for a little different Microsoft but it feels I think design is confident very empowered and it feels very collaborative right now. So what's the next thing for you. What's your next challenge. You know the next challenge I think is what we're right in the middle of. We still have a productivity experience and or set of experiences that the company has yet to release that is still in design with. We have more work to do at a corporate level to bring the things that we're discussing into a into a plan that actually scales where it's no longer starting just as a grassroots level and we have a lot of goodwill but we need to organize this or organize it so that it sticks and becomes operationalized. And the artist in me also doesn't want to over define it because we'll kill the darn thing. You know darn thing meaning this notion of the qualitative aspects and subjective aspects of design that comes from experimentation you know a sense of humor and all those other things that keep us light. That's really because we could go the other direction where we take this thing too seriously and we lose the magic that's happening at a grassroots level. It does seem like Microsoft isn't taking itself too seriously on a lot of levels. I really hope not. I mean it's taking itself seriously but not in the sense that it you know can't have a little bit of fun. It seems like people are having a little bit more fun with products here right now. So and I know I know we need to wrap up. We've only got a little bit more time but I just I'm wondering you know if you look back 10 years ago or 15 years ago there were many places where Microsoft was unchallenged or didn't have the kind of challenges that we see now but in today's market with almost in every one of these spaces I mean you could look at entertainment you know home entertainment you can look at mobile devices, laptop, tablet, productivity, I mean you've got real competition coming from big challengers. How I mean does that worry you? Does it I mean does it how does that inform what you guys are doing? Are you does it make you more reactive? This is this is the part when I said the community feels more confident. This is the part I love and that I really believe we're start worse we're not looking over our shoulders as much as we used to. And the the type of planning that we are doing is which involves user experience and product planning formal product planning and development etc. is much more long term. You've seen some of the envisioning lab work and the office labs and we have more teams that are actually thinking one to two steps ahead and we're doing a better job at creating frameworks to actually connect the dots with a a smarter idea of who we are and who we aren't and this is back to I think Metro in some ways. We want to be as good as we can be at Microsoft and we're no longer comparing finding ourselves comparing ourselves to other design organizations or other companies and I like that feel right. Certainly we're aware of what's happening but everything that's happened today and recently that you're seeing and I think we're sensing coming from this alignment is is done by our ourselves. We did it because we did it's the right thing. It turned out to be something very authentic and unique to Microsoft and there's more coming that is more just about what we think we should be doing and I think that confidence is attracting better designers better developers and better program managers because they sense that we are no longer looking over our shoulders going to chase tail lights whatever it may be that that perception of the company is is definitely not holding true internally. We're actually focused on what we're doing and we have a roadmap and we have confidence in that roadmap and it's smart and we want to and are empowering designers researchers to do their best work with new environments the right tools the right types of challenges the right type of training so there is a collective confidence that really makes it feel like we no longer have to look outside we're no longer nervous. Yeah. And I like that aspect. Yeah. There's there's a and it's not an arrogance I think it's a confidence that we've been at this long enough and it's time we just step into that and really do what we're paid to do. All right. I think that's a that's a good place to leave this. Yeah. Steve thanks so much. Josh nice to meet you. Really appreciate it. Thank you.