Tom Button and the afterlife of good software

In 1988, Tom Button’s classmates thought he had arrived too late. Microsoft had already gone public. Its shares had already climbed. Why join a company after the interesting part was over? Years later, speaking in Silicon Valley, Button remembered their verdict: “you’re just chasing yesterday’s news.”

He went anyway. He wanted to learn how to build technology and run a technology business. What followed included QuickBasic, Visual Basic and Visual Studio, then senior jobs overseeing Windows product management and platform strategy. The supposedly exhausted opportunity occupied nineteen years of his working life.

The joke acquired another layer in 2012. Button founded Mobilize.Net to help companies carry yesterday’s software into tomorrow’s computing environments. Old code, it turned out, could be a business opportunity too. In a profession fond of announcing the future, he had found a considerable amount of unfinished work in the past.

The trouble with making something useful

Software has an awkward way of rewarding its makers. Build something useful and people keep using it. They add features, accommodate exceptions and teach it the peculiar rules of their businesses. Eventually the platform ages. The business still needs the application. A product that once represented progress becomes somebody’s migration project.

Button had been close to both ends of that process. At Microsoft he began as a program manager for QuickBasic and the BASIC Compiler, then worked on the launch of the first Visual Basic. These were tools for making other things: a developer used them to produce an application, and that application acquired a life of its own.

That distinction gives his career its shape. A developer tool’s consequences extend beyond the release date. Years afterward, a company can still depend on the systems its programmers created. Success leaves obligations behind. The more useful the software, the harder it can become to arrange its retirement party.

By June 2002, Button was explaining Visual Studio .NET to an audience in Silicon Valley. He had recently returned from his fifteenth Princeton reunion. His degree combined electrical engineering and computer science; a short spell at Boston Consulting Group preceded Microsoft. The reunion supplied a convenient reminder of just how long his supposedly belated arrival had lasted.

“you’re just chasing yesterday’s news.”

The classmates’ verdict, recalled by Tom Button in 2002

A company built for the code left behind

Mobilize.Net announced its new migration business on June 5, 2012. Button was president and CEO. Beside him were people with experience in the machinery they intended to move: DeeDee Walsh from Microsoft’s developer business, Roberto Leiton from ArtinSoft, and ArtinSoft founder Carlos Araya as chief scientist.

The connection to ArtinSoft mattered. Mobilize.Net began with licensed migration technology whose history predated the new company. ArtinSoft’s engines had already been shipped with Microsoft Visual Studio. Button’s venture therefore joined an experienced commercial team to a technical foundation that had been used on real applications.

The proposition was practical. Businesses wanted applications on web, mobile and cloud platforms. They also wanted to retain the behavior encoded in their existing systems. Starting again could mean paying programmers to rediscover decisions their predecessors had already made. The past had accumulated a rather expensive collection of instructions.

In November 2012, Mobilize.Net introduced WebMAP, its Web Modernization Accelerator Program. Its approach combined automated analysis and transformation with engineering services and developer support. Button’s argument centered on preserving the business knowledge in existing applications while changing their architecture.

There was a consequential technical distinction underneath the sales pitch. WebMAP described analysis of meaning and patterns across blocks of code, rather than simple substitution one line at a time. It also promised native output without dependence on a proprietary third-party runtime. A migration needed to leave developers with something they could maintain after the moving vans departed.

The following year brought another example: Visual Basic Upgrade Companion gained Visual Studio 2013 support and more than 500 additional gadgets and code optimizations. Windows XP’s approaching end of support gave customers a deadline. Button’s earlier work in developer tools and Windows now intersected in the decisions facing enterprise IT departments.

Good technology still needs a route to customers

Getting the conversion right was only part of running the business. Mobilize.Net became the subject of an Indian Institute of Management Calcutta teaching case about growth. Its question was familiar to many specialist software firms: should the company build its own consulting and integration capabilities, or reach customers through other firms?

The choice sounds administrative until one considers what it asks of a founder. Building services means building another organization. Partnering means depending on someone else’s priorities and customer relationships. Large systems integrators offer reach; smaller ones present different tradeoffs. An excellent tool does not make those decisions disappear.

The case placed Button and his advisers inside that problem. It is a useful corrective to the tidy version of entrepreneurial history, in which a product appears, demand follows and an acquisition materializes. Between the product and the transaction sit questions about who sells the work, who delivers it and who accepts responsibility when a customer needs help.

Button was also taking his experience into other companies. In February 2015, Itineris announced that he had joined its board. The Belgian software business served utilities, an industry where billing and customer systems carry substantial operational responsibilities. His brief included technology strategy and the evolution of its UMAX products.

He described an appetite for helping technology companies grow. Itineris offered a particular combination: an established European business pursuing an expansion in North America. Button’s familiarity with Microsoft’s products and business ecosystem gave that ambition a practical connection to the platforms its customers already used.

In 2017, GuardSquare added him to its board, with attention to growth strategy and North American operations. Application security was a different business from migration. It still involved developers, valuable software and customers deciding whom to trust with it. His board work followed the same professional neighborhood without requiring every company to sell the same thing.

One foundation, two destinations

The decisive Mobilize.Net transaction arrived in two parts. In January 2023, Snowflake announced its intention to acquire SnowConvert, the company’s database migration tools. Snowflake’s explanation focused on a stubborn obstacle: moving data also requires converting the code that makes the database useful.

A warehouse full of information is only part of a working system. The logic surrounding it has to come along. SnowConvert addressed that conversion work, reducing the manual coding required to move existing workloads. The transaction also extended Snowflake’s services presence in Costa Rica, Colombia and Bellevue.

The closing announcement in February described the wider arrangement. Growth Acceleration Partners acquired the application migration unit, including WebMAP, Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, services teams and the Mobilize.Net brand. Snowflake acquired the company and its data business, including SnowConvert and BlackDiamond Studio.

Button explained that the units shared a technical foundation while serving different markets. The split gave each a home with complementary offerings. It was a specific answer to a problem that had accompanied the company’s growth: related technology can produce businesses with different customers and different futures.

His account of the company’s principles emphasized growth “without debt, dilution or layoffs.” That is a revealing set of measures to choose at the moment of an exit. It puts the financing of the journey and the treatment of employees beside the destination. The company’s sale price was not publicly disclosed.

Meanwhile, the trees

There is another Button enterprise in Redmond where the product arrives with branches. Buttonwood Farm is family owned and operated, growing certified organic Christmas trees. Its offerings include trees customers can select and cut themselves, delivery, and wreaths made on site from the farm’s own boughs.

A September 2022 photograph shows Yelena and Tom at the farm entrance beneath a Ukrainian flag. The farm describes its support for Ukrainian refugees and its use of local employment as part of its organic approach. This is a business with a physical address, seasonal customers and work that cannot be completed by releasing a software update.

His public profile contains another long-running commitment: youth coaching. It records soccer coaching from 1997 through 2025 and Little League baseball coaching from 1996 through 2024. He lists a national D soccer license and teams at Crossfire Select, The Overlake School and The Bear Creek School. These commitments occupied years that also contained senior corporate jobs and company building.

Back at the next beginning

Button’s current work takes him into early-stage AI investing through BlackDiamond Ventures and BlackDiamondAI.Fund. Its team includes fellow developer-tools veterans Rick LaPlante and Richard Beck. The investment focus is AI platforms, middleware and tooling for developers, a recognizable address for someone whose career began with BASIC.

In October 2024, he joined Dee Dee Walsh on the Beyond the Blue Badge podcast to discuss his Microsoft experience and startup leadership. The pairing itself contained a piece of the story: Walsh had been part of Mobilize.Net’s founding executive team. Careers in software move across companies, but the working relationships can travel with them.

There is a pleasing complication in Button’s return to backing new tools. Each successful generation will leave applications behind it. Some will become indispensable. Some will eventually need help moving. His career has covered the exhilaration of launching a platform and the less photogenic responsibility of helping its customers leave an old one. Yesterday’s news has kept him occupied for quite a while.