Monthly Archives: September 2006

Citrix Engineering was fairly small in 1993.  I think there was about 15 people in the group (dev and test).  It always was surprising how much we could accomplish with such a small team.  I was thinking about this blog today when I realized that our secret probably came from our hiring process.  Instead of having our hiring being driven mostly from HR, we took a very active role in hiring people.  Everyone that interviewed the candidates had a say in whether or not the person should be hired.  Even if just one person said no, that was enough to justify not hiring them.  I remember that it was based on counting to three and then showing either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

There were three departments in Engineering.  Two in dev and one in test.  Scott Kinnear and Andy Stergiades ran the dev group while Russ Naples ran the test group.  Most of the devs did not mind much which manager they had.  We really just worked as a group anyhow. 

Teamwork was pivotal to getting things done.  We made a point not to hire someone that wasn’t a team player.

Most of the devs had come from IBM but we also had people from Harris.  It was a good mix of talent.

We basically claimed half the floor for dev, test, and the labs.

By 1997, Citrix was reaping in a great deal of success based on their WinFrame 1.x product line. This software was based on Windows NT 3.51 and instead of just patching a 3.51 installation, Citrix actually shipped a full modified version of NT 3.51. This work had been done by a small core of developers between 1993 and 1995. Work in 1996 focused on supporting the upcoming NT 4.0 release from Microsoft. This version was unofficially called WinFrame 2.0. Citrix had worked hard to support the latest changes and had already merged and tested the code base by early 1997.

Early in 1997, Microsoft declared that it would no longer license the operating system code to Citrix for NT 4.0. In fact, it became clear that Microsoft wanted such work to stay in house. Microsoft had some ventures (investments) in an alternative solution for making NT multiuser. I don’t remember the name of this group but I’m sure someone out there will. The message to Citrix was to either sell the multiuser component or Citrix wouldn’t have this part of the market anymore. Tough negotiations proceeded. The stock price sank. Speculation was rife. Many Citrites of the time saw this as a threat to the survival of the company.

Later that year Citrix and Microsoft struck a deal to sell the multiuser code to Microsoft for something like 185 million dollars over five years. Microsoft would not buy ICA but would instead develop RDP. RDP was originated from another software acquisition. Citrix would no longer be allowed to ship its own versions of operating systems and would be only given a restricted access to the source with no rights to build derivative works from such source.

The company, obviously, survived this crisis. I think it was mostly due to the strength of the work to do multiuser and I would give strong credit to John Richardson, Brad Pedersen, and Mike Discavage. Brad is still with the company and is the Chief Architect and the sole Citrix Fellow. He started with the company in 1989 and obviously is one of the originating developers. His strong Unix background made all the difference during the early years of the company.

1997 was the year I left Citrix to move to Australia. I was offered a Systems Engineer job for Citrix but decided I didn’t want to travel to all the English speaking countries in the southern hemisphere as part of my job. I started with a local reseller in Brisbane instead.

Being that I started first at Citrix in 1993, I know a fair amount of Citrix history.  There are many people that now work for the company, but when we first started there was less than 50 people.  It was a family of sorts.  When the company was first founded in 1989, most of the people left IBM Boca Raton from jobs in OS/2 to go start a Multiuser OS/2 venture.  Instead of dealing with IBM, it was decided to license the code from Microsoft instead.  Ed Iacobucci had a vision of providing a server on OS/2 that could give similar functionality to Unix.

Unfortunately no one really wanted to run OS/2 text based applications due to the fact that there were so few of them.  From the high of 1989 to the low of early 1993, it didn’t look like the company would make it.  I remember vividly in early 1993 the whole company being brought into the conference room and being told that it didn’t look like we were going to get paychecks that week.  The silence was huge.  I remember thinking that perhaps I had made a large mistake leaving IBM to join such a small company.  At the last minute, more money was raised and a new round of investors were called in and company had enough money to run until the next crisis.  We were all aware of how close we were to going under.  Luckily this memory is the worst it got at Citrix in those early days.  We really didn’t thrive until we released WinFrame and we went public in 1995.  1993 was really the worst it got.