Tipperary achiever who rose through ranks of computer giant

EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD:PJ Hough, Corporate vice-president of Program Management for the Office Group at Microsoft

THE NEXT time you open Microsoft Office on your device of choice, know that an Irish man is playing a fairly significant role in shaping what’s in front of you.

Tipperary man PJ Hough is the corporate vice-president of programme management for Microsoft’s Office group. As such, the 47-year-old has overall stewardship of the office baby at the Seattle software giant. It’s no small responsibility.

At the Office 2010 launch party in June last year, Microsoft estimated there were about 750 million copies of its flagship software installed globally.

Add in pirated versions and instances where users have Office running on more than one PC, and the number is more like a billion, according to marketing research company, ComScore.

Founded in 1975, with Windows and Office, Microsoft laid a golden egg. With the young gun of the software industry now approaching middle age, its profits remain eye-watering, clocking up $5.4 billion (€4 billion) last quarter alone.

These billions come almost entirely from the Windows and Office software the company developed decades ago. Ensuring that each iteration remains a cash cow for the giant is something of which Hough has been to fore since 1994.

Hough attended the vocational school in Borrisokane in the 1980s, a time when Irelands unemployment levels were edging towards 15 per cent, but as career guidance counsellors urged that “computers” were the future, Hough was listening.

“There was an Apple 2 computer in the school in Borrisokane at the time,” he recalls. “None of the teachers had been trained how to use it and I remember saving pocket money to go to Eason in Limerick to buy a book on how to programme it.”

Bitten by the computing bug, Hough signed up to a BA in computer applications at the NIHE, now DCU.

Graduating in 1986, he was one of the few to secure a job on home turf and joined Digital in Galway where he spent eight years.

With itchy feet in his late 20s, Hough entered the lottery for a green card to the United States. When his number came up he applied to Microsoft in Redmond in Washington state.

In 1994, right before the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 95, it was the cusp of the big PC boom.

“I made a bunch of scary decisions if you think about it,” says Hough. “The decision to take on the degree without a lot of confidence that that market was going to work out . . . Microsoft did not have the identity it has now and certainly no one knew where Seattle was when I told them where I was going to be living.”

Hough’s timing was fortuitous. “I joined an Office team that had been formed two months before,” he says. “When I arrived, I thought everybody knew what they were doing, but I ended up being one of the founding members of the team that actually put together the Office product as we know it today.”

After seven years working on the developer-oriented features of Office such as the VBA programming language and Access, he joined the Office product planning team, which brought him back to Dublin for two years in 2001.

“I was gathering intelligence about how customers in Europe were using our products to influence the design of the work we were doing in Redmond,” he says of his stint here.

Moving back to in Redmond in 2003, Hough now leads Microsoft’s Office programme management team.

His team exceeds 1,000 people, a quarter of whom are in Dublin.

So what of the software snobs who like to claim that Office is buggy and the bugs are a scheme to make us buy the next version?

“It’s certainly not our intention to ever ship a bug,” says Hough.

For him, it’s all about listening to customers.

The development of Office is driven by harder data, too, he says. “We get a lot of data from customer PCs. We extract information about patterns of usage so we do have some ideas about the things . . . that customers are most struggling with . . . we are always amazed at the creativity of individual users who find new ways to use the software.

“Many of the bugs that people discover are often to do with patterns of usage that we just did not anticipate or expect.”

With Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer promising in July last year that the arrival of a Windows 7 slate to rival its Apple and Android competitors was nigh, how does Hough see the future of Office? He is coy.

“We’re going to see a lot of exciting changes in hardware platforms in the next few years,” he says. “Over the last few years, with Windows Phone 7, we shipped Office on the phone, so we have a set of Office capabilities for mobile devices. In Office 2010, we also shipped the web application so we have Office available on web browsers.

“To the extent that these slate devices exist, and have a strong internet browsing presence on them, we feel Office is well positioned for people who want to use those devices.”

While most of us think of the PC version of Office, Hough is instrumental in developing a wider picture.

“The idea of having one notebook that lives in one place in the cloud and being able to connect to it seamlessly from all your devices – to me that is now the new productivity.”