Overseer of Microsoft's flagship Office applications Word and Excel, Simonyi also directed development of Excel's predecessor Multiplan. In 1981, he applied directly to Bill Gates for a job at Microsoft. With Multiplan, he pursued a strategy called the "revenue bomb", whereby the product ran on a virtual machine that was ported to each platform. The resulting application was highly portable, although Simonyi did not foresee the rapid adoption of MS-DOS that made such efforts less important.
Simonyi introduced the techniques of object-oriented programming that he had learned at Xerox to Microsoft. He developed the Hungarian notation convention for naming variables. Originally these standards were part of his doctoral thesis. The Hungarian notation has been widely used inside Microsoft.
