“Eat your personal pet food” — the observe of firms utilizing their very own merchandise internally earlier than releasing them to clients — was as soon as a extensively used phrase within the tech business. However do you know that it emerged from Microsoft within the Nineteen Eighties?
Because of former Microsoft govt and veteran tech chief Paul Maritz, talking on a current episode of TiE Seattle’s From Startup to Exit podcast, we now have a transparent origin story explaining how this phrase jumped from pet meals TV advertisements to Microsoft mantra to tech business staple.
Maritz defined that the phrase truly 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 return from a collection of Alpo pet food commercials from the Seventies and early ’80s, as former Home windows and Workplace govt Stephen Sinofsky recalled in his guide, Hardcore Software program. Actor Lorne Greene famously mentioned within the advertisements 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 venture — a product with no clients and little traction.
“We had been nowhere within the networking enterprise,” Maritz recalled on the podcast. Going through that actuality, he despatched an e-mail to his group with a easy message: in the event that they didn’t have customers, they’d must turn out to be their very own. In different phrases, he wrote, they had been going to need to eat their very own pet food.
Engineering chief Brian Valentine embraced the problem and arrange an inside server named dogfood — a reputation that caught and helped cement the observe inside Microsoft tradition. Over time, “dogfooding” grew to become a badge of engineering integrity and accountability: in case you weren’t utilizing your personal software program, why ought to anybody else?
Microsoft would ultimately acquire floor and surpass Novell’s dominance within the networking market, thanks partly to inside efforts like dogfooding. And the phrase — as soon as a unusual Microsoft time period — unfold throughout the tech business within the Nineties and 2000s as a shorthand for inside testing and product confidence.
Nowadays, “consuming your personal pet food” has largely fallen out of favor within the tech business, changed by gentler options like “pre-release validation” or the extra appetizing “drink your personal champagne.” However the core concept stays: use what you construct, and ensure it really works — particularly earlier than asking others to depend on it.
Maritz grew to become govt vp of Microsoft’s Platforms Technique and Developer Group, basically 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 turn out to be CEO of VMware, co‑founder and CEO of Pi Corp., and CEO and chairman of Pivotal Software program, main the corporate by means of its IPO in 2018.
The total episode — exploring Maritz’s early experiences, management classes, and pivotal moments at Microsoft — is a part of the Microsoft@50 collection on TiE Seattle’s From Startup to Exit podcast, with hosts Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar. I’ve been catching up on the collection over the previous few days, and actually having fun with it.
