Microsoft Dynamics GP Vet Gaboury Departing, Shares History of Dexterity's Creation

David Musgrave shares the news that Dave Gaboury, the longest tenured employee working on Microsoft Dynamics GP and Great Plains is departing Microsoft after 31 years of employment on the GP team.  It's not just the length of tenure that's interesting here - Gaboury is also a member of the original team tasked with developing the graphical software platform that would become Dexterity. 

Gaboury shares some of his history and experiences on the Project EB (for "Even Better") team  on Musgrave's blog.

As a 1980's R&D project into new graphical software, the Project EB team worked to develop everything from scratch - from the UI to database integration, memory management, a new scripting language, reporting, and test tools.  Gaboury says he worked specifically on the metamodel and development tools. 

Interestingly, Gaboury recalls his team's uncertainty about which OS to build for, choosing between Mac OS, Windows, and IBM's OS/2.  As a result they were building everything to be cross-platform, limiting the use of off the shelf components.   And the dynamics between Apple, IBM, and Microsoft at that time reflected a different competitive environment.  Gaboury writes:

"It was a confusing time in the history of graphical operating systems. The Mac OS was the most mature product but it's use as a business platform was uncertain; Microsoft had just released version 2 of Windows but it still had very limited capabilities; and IBM was about to release a graphical front end (known as "Presentation Manager") to its OS/2 operating system. Microsoft and IBM were still buddies back then. Steve Ballmer visited Great Plains at that time and actually encouraged us to write for ...