“Eat your personal pet food” — the apply of firms utilizing their very own merchandise internally earlier than releasing them to prospects — was as soon as a extensively used phrase within the tech trade. However do you know that it emerged from Microsoft within the Eighties?
Due to former Microsoft govt and veteran tech chief Paul Maritz, talking on a latest episode of TiE Seattle’s Startup to Exit podcast, we now have a transparent origin story explaining how this phrase jumped from pet meals TV adverts to Microsoft mantra to tech trade staple.
Maritz defined that the phrase really originated with Jim Harris, Microsoft’s first head of OEM gross sales, who would lean again after shows and ask in his booming voice, “Sure, however will the canines eat the pet food?” — utilizing it as the last word check of whether or not a product would succeed.
Whereas the supply of Harris’ inspiration wasn’t mentioned on the podcast, it’s believed to come back from a sequence of Alpo pet food commercials from the Seventies and early ’80s, as former Home windows and Workplace govt Stephen Sinofsky recalled in his e book, Hardcore Software program. Actor Lorne Greene famously stated within the adverts that he fed the product to his personal canines.
At Microsoft, the phrase took on new life throughout a troublesome second. The corporate was struggling to compete with Novell within the networking market, and Maritz had been tasked with main the LAN Supervisor undertaking — a product with no prospects and little traction.
“We have been nowhere within the networking enterprise,” Maritz recalled on the podcast. Going through that actuality, he despatched an e-mail to his staff with a easy message: in the event that they didn’t have customers, they’d must change into their very own. In different phrases, he wrote, they have been going to should eat their very own pet food.
Engineering chief Brian Valentine embraced the problem and arrange an inner server named dogfood — a reputation that caught and helped cement the apply inside Microsoft tradition. Over time, “dogfooding” grew to become a badge of engineering integrity and accountability: in the event you weren’t utilizing your personal software program, why ought to anybody else?
Microsoft would finally achieve floor and surpass Novell’s dominance within the networking market, thanks partly to inner efforts like dogfooding. And the phrase — as soon as a unusual Microsoft time period — unfold throughout the tech trade within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s as a shorthand for inner testing and product confidence.
Nowadays, “consuming your personal pet food” has largely fallen out of favor within the tech trade, changed by gentler alternate options like “pre-release validation” or the extra appetizing “drink your personal champagne.” However the core thought stays: use what you construct, and ensure it really works — particularly earlier than asking others to depend on it.
Maritz grew to become govt vice chairman of Microsoft’s Platforms Technique and Developer Group, primarily Microsoft’s third‑rating govt behind Invoice Gates and Steve Ballmer on the time. He left Microsoft in 2000 after a 14‑12 months tenure, occurring to change into CEO of VMware, co‑founder and CEO of Pi Corp., and CEO and chairman of Pivotal Software program, main the corporate by its IPO in 2018.
The complete episode — exploring Maritz’s early experiences, management classes, and pivotal moments at Microsoft — is a part of the latest Microsoft@50 sequence on TiE Seattle’s Startup to Exit podcast, with hosts Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar. I’ve been catching up on the sequence over the previous few days, and actually having fun with it.
