How a Microsoft exec managed to pitch Microsoft Word through the genius tactic of being able to actually use it in a ‘type-off’ demanded by clients: ‘I was the only one who’d actually been a secretary’

The GDC 2025 highlight for me was a talk by Monica Harrington, Valve co-founder and the company’s first chief marketing officer, about her long and storied career in tech. And like many of Valve’s earliest employees, Harrington came there from Microsoft, where one of her major responsibilities was marketing Microsoft Word and later the Office suite.

“It’s the mid-90s, and I’m in a new job at Microsoft overseeing PR for Microsoft’s newish Consumer Division,” says Harrington in her talk. “I’d previously worked as a product manager on Microsoft Word and later took on a new role overseeing all of the applications and developer tools PR for the company. We’d recently launched the version of Microsoft Office that would result—sorry to Microsoft’s antitrust lawyers—in total domination over our old rivals WordPerfect and Lotus.”

Harrington had ended up in this role because of her undeniable results as part of the Microsoft Word team, and when PCG’s Ted Litchfield had the chance to sit down with her after the talk one of the topics under discussion was this period in marketing Microsoft Word. Word was not the default it would become, and Harrington herself has characterised this time as “the billion-dollar Word processing wars” with WordPerfect a particular thorn in Redmond’s side.

There was a trick up Harrington’s sleeve, however. OK it’s not a trick. She could actually use the software, which was not as common as you might think.

“So kind of a funny thing about my experience is I’m actually a certified legal secretary,” laughs Harrington. “So very early on between high school and college, I was very young getting out of high school and got some training. That was always so I could take care of myself but what it meant was, years later, when I was the Word product manager I remember going to a presentation [alongside] WordPerfect, and there’s Word, and I didn’t know this ahead of time but it wasn’t a demo.”

The clients didn’t just want the boil-in-the-bag tech demo typically rolled-out at such presentations. They wanted to see the product being used and demonstrated in real-time, and you have to remember this would be in the late 1980s: The general familiarity with word processors just wasn’t there, even at a company like Microsoft.

“The people who had asked for it, they actually wanted essentially a type-off,” said Harrington. “They wanted you to produce a document. And they told you what the document was, and you had to produce it. And so here I am, and WordPerfect owned the market. And the Microsoft guy who asked me to come out… I can see him over there, and I can see the look on his face when they ask for that.”

The look on his face will have to be left to your imagination, but this is clearly the kind of scenario that would make certain Microsoft product managers wake up screaming in the night.

“And I said ‘it’s okay, it’s okay,’ you know,” recalls Harrington, who was able to sit down and produce exactly what the client was demanding in Word. “And that was hugely important, and yeah I was lucky to be able to do that. You know, it was down to [the fact] I’m pretty sure I was the only one on the Word product marketing team who’d actually been a secretary.”

Most of the rest of Harrington’s talk focuses on her time at Valve, but the common thread among all her recollections is just how brilliant she is at both selling a product and understanding what people want from it. “You can’t use up your credibility,” Harrington says of truth in marketing, “and you can’t lose it.”

There’s also the story of how her nephew buying a CD-ROM copier got Harrington very interested in DRM, as well as the intriguing alt-history where Valve got out of the games business entirely. Gabe Newell had his eyes on a social network in the ’90s that “was not in a games context at all”—meaning Valve-owned social media could’ve been a very real thing.