Microsoft signed an NDA with us in 2019 and never took the meeting

This is a short story told entirely in dates. I am not going to tell you what happened inside Microsoft, because I do not know. Everything below is a document I still have.

December 2018

A product marketing manager at Microsoft emailed me and my co-founder out of the blue. Her signature read Product Marketing, Creativity. She was on the Modern Life and Devices Marketing team.

“I am a member of the Microsoft Modern Life and Devices Marketing team and we’re very interested in what Desygner offers customers… we’d like to set up a brief meeting to discuss what we’re developing with you, and to look at potentials areas where our companies can partner… We do need to have an NDA signed before we share details.”

I was not going to CES, so I said let us do a call, and asked her to send the NDA.

January 2019

She replied on 3 January: “Im going to look up the NDA and get it over to you shortly. Can we touch base after the 10th?”

The NDA arrived. It was not a form I filled in and hoped about. It was executed. Microsoft’s Assistant General Counsel signed it on 3 January 2019. I signed it on 10 January at 2:13 in the morning, Pacific time, because that is what the time zone does to you when you build from Australia.

Then nothing.

I followed up the same day I signed. I followed up on 23 January. I followed up again on 3 March. The only reply I ever received was an out of office telling me she was on a beach in Thailand.

The meeting never happened. Nothing was ever shared, in either direction. I want to be completely clear about that, because it matters: Microsoft never saw anything of ours, and we never saw anything of theirs. That is the whole point of the story. They took the trouble to get a corporate NDA executed by their own legal department, and then did not use it.

October 2022

Microsoft announced a product called Designer. Public preview April 2023. General availability July 2024.

My company launched on 18 January 2016. It is called Desygner.

I am not claiming anyone can own the word designer, because nobody can. I am not claiming anybody stole anything, because on the record above there was nothing to steal. Four years is a long time and coincidences are real. You have the same documents I have. Draw your own conclusion, or draw none.

What we did about it

Nothing, for a long time. We were a small team on the Gold Coast with no venture money and a product to build. Desygner shipped on Android in 2016, a year before Canva did, and that is where most of our first users came from. We got to about 50 million registered users the slow way.

What changed is more recent and more boring. Over the past couple of years we stopped paying for the stack we were running on. Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel. All of it. Not out of spite. Because I did not want to keep building a company on top of a company that would not answer an email.

So we built our own. Ciao is an AI engineering platform: it writes real code into your repo, gates every change behind approvals, keeps a full audit trail, tests before publish and rolls back in one click. We pointed it at ourselves first and rebuilt Desygner on it. Then we built Automo on top — documents, sheets, storage, brand.

It is in alpha. It is not finished. It runs our company.