The GDC 2025 spotlight for me was a chat by Monica Harrington, Valve co-founder and the corporate’s first chief advertising officer, about her lengthy and storied profession in tech. And like a lot of Valve’s earliest workers, Harrington got here there from Microsoft, the place one in every of her main duties was advertising Microsoft Phrase and later the Workplace suite.
“It is the mid-90s, and I am in a brand new job at Microsoft overseeing PR for Microsoft’s newish Shopper Division,” says Harrington in her discuss. “I might beforehand labored as a product supervisor on Microsoft Phrase and later took on a brand new function overseeing the entire purposes and developer instruments PR for the corporate. We would lately launched the model of Microsoft Workplace that may end result—sorry to Microsoft’s antitrust attorneys—in whole domination over our previous rivals WordPerfect and Lotus.”
Harrington had ended up on this function due to her simple outcomes as a part of the Microsoft Phrase workforce, and when PCG’s Ted Litchfield had the possibility to sit down down together with her after the discuss one of many subjects underneath dialogue was this era in advertising Microsoft Phrase. Phrase was not the default it might turn into, and Harrington herself has characterised this time as “the billion-dollar Phrase processing wars” with WordPerfect a selected thorn in Redmond’s facet.
There was a trick up Harrington’s sleeve, nonetheless. OK it isn’t a trick. She may truly use the software program, which was not as frequent as you may assume.
“So sort of a humorous factor about my expertise is I am truly an authorized authorized secretary,” laughs Harrington. “So very early on between highschool and faculty, I used to be very younger getting out of highschool and bought some coaching. That was at all times so I may care for myself however what it meant was, years later, once I was the Phrase product supervisor I keep in mind going to a presentation [alongside] WordPerfect, and there is Phrase, and I did not know this forward of time however it wasn’t a demo.”
The purchasers did not simply need the boil-in-the-bag tech demo usually rolled-out at such displays. They wished to see the product getting used and demonstrated in real-time, and you need to keep in mind this might be within the late Nineteen Eighties: The overall familiarity with phrase processors simply wasn’t there, even at an organization like Microsoft.
“The individuals who had requested for it, they really wished primarily a type-off,” stated Harrington. “They wished you to supply a doc. And so they instructed you what the doc was, and also you needed to produce it. And so right here I’m, and WordPerfect owned the market. And the Microsoft man who requested me to return out… I can see him over there, and I can see the look on his face once they ask for that.”
The look on his face should be left to your creativeness, however that is clearly the sort of state of affairs that may make sure Microsoft product managers get up screaming within the evening.
“And I stated ‘it is okay, it is okay,’ you already know,” recollects Harrington, who was capable of sit down and produce precisely what the shopper was demanding in Phrase. “And that was vastly vital, and yeah I used to be fortunate to have the ability to do this. You realize, it was all the way down to [the fact] I am fairly positive I used to be the one one on the Phrase product advertising workforce who’d truly been a secretary.”
A lot of the remainder of Harrington’s discuss focuses on her time at Valve, however the frequent thread amongst all her recollections is simply how good she is at each promoting a product and understanding what folks need from it. “You possibly can’t deplete your credibility,” Harrington says of reality in advertising, “and you’ll’t lose it.”
There’s additionally the story of how her nephew shopping for a CD-ROM copier bought Harrington very thinking about DRM, in addition to the intriguing alt-history the place Valve bought out of the video games enterprise totally. Gabe Newell had his eyes on a social community within the ’90s that “was not in a video games context in any respect”—that means Valve-owned social media may’ve been a really actual factor.
