Brad Silverberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brad Silverberg is an entrepreneur, most noted for his work at Microsoft in 1990–1999 as Senior VP and product manager for MS-DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office. He was named PC Magazine's Person of the Year[1] in 1995 for his leadership of Windows 95.
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[edit] Early career
Brad Silverberg earned a BS degree magna cum laude in Computer Science from Brown University, and an MS in Computer Science from University of Toronto. His first work exprience was research at SRI International, one of the four first ARPANET nodes; later Brad was hired as the first employee at Analytica, a Silicon Valley startup. Since 1985, Brad Silverberg was VP of engineering at Borland after their acquisition of Analytica.
Brad's early career included also working at Apple Computer in the early 1980s on the Lisa project, where he failed miserably [2].
[edit] Career at Microsoft
In 1990, Brad Silverberg left Borland to lead the personal systems division at Microsoft. Quite a number of people left Borland to follow Brad at Microsoft in the following years, leading to a number of failed lawsuits from Borland [3].
At the start of his tenure, the personal systems division was already a prime moneymaker with MS-DOS, at that time sold only through OEMs. With MS-DOS 5, Microsoft made MS-DOS available at retail as an upgrade product. It sold very well, as did MS-DOS 6, which was introduced early in April, 1993. It included DoubleSpace on-the-fly disk compression and a disk analysis and repair utility called ScanDisk.
In early 1990, Microsoft and IBM still saw the future as OS/2, despite the difficulty of enticing users to move to an OS which had limited backward compatibility with DOS. Windows 3.0 could run DOS and Windows applications simultaneously. The success of Windows 3.0, and the success of Excel and Word for Windows (based on the popular Excel and Word for Apple Macintosh) resulted in Microsoft breaking with IBM and stopping work on OS/2. Windows 3.1, a substantially more robust version of Windows 3.0, was introduced in March 1992 and became very widely adopted, including by leading OEM's.
However, Microsoft did not intend to make Windows its only OS offering. Mainframe sales were lagging and Microsoft wanted a piece of the new non-mainframe server business. The Windows NT team was formed within the Systems division to create a "New Technology" operating system while Silverberg's personal systems division continued to work on Windows and MS-DOS.
Windows for Workgroups was Microsoft's entry to the peer-to-peer networking arena. It also marked Windows' transition to managing networking and (for version 3.11) the file system natively, instead of resorting to MS-DOS functions or third-party products.
Microsoft had also moved to make Windows the "default" x86 machine configuration by pushing OEM sales. This increased Windows penetration and the number of applications written for Windows, and helped establish Windows as the standard PC operating system.
Windows 95, code-named "Chicago", debuted in August 1995 in a media circus. Literally. Microsoft converted a sports field to a runway complete with Ferris Wheel, big top, and Jay Leno as Master of Ceremonies. Sales were strong. The OEM version of Windows 95 also introduced the Internet Explorer web browser, code-named "O'Hare"; IE missed the window for the retail version but was in the retail "Plus!" product. Brad led the early Internet effort at Microsoft, including the chronicled "Internet turnaround."
After shipping Windows 95, he turned his fulltime focus onto the Internet efforts at Microsoft, which led to the creation of the Internet Platform and Tools Division 1996, which he led.
In 1997, Brad was given responsibilities for Office but his principal interest remained with the Internet. He took a sabbatical that summer to reflect on where the Internet was going at Microsoft. He returned as a part-time consultant for new president and later CEO, Steve Ballmer. On October 29, 1999, he left Microsoft.
[edit] Current career
In March 2000, he led a group of former Microsoft executives to found Ignition, a venture capital firm. Since then and up to now, Brad Silverberg works as a partner of the firm.
