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Copyright © 2026 Michael Herman (Bindloss, Alberta, Canada) – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License

Q1: When I worked at Microsoft and a Microsoft partner would come to us and suggest a new product or a new project, we had an internal phrase or an internal question we used to ask ourselves somewhat in jest, and the phrase is, is it a floor wax or a dessert topping? And I’m wondering if you know the origins of that phrase.

Yes — the phrase “Is it a floor wax or a dessert topping?” actually has a pretty clear origin in American pop culture, and that’s almost certainly where groups at Microsoft (and many tech companies) picked it up and started using it as a humorous internal shorthand.

Here’s the basics:

📺 Origin: Saturday Night Live “Shimmer” Sketch (1976)

The phrase comes from a parody commercial on Saturday Night Live from the show’s first season, for a fictitious product called “New Shimmer.” In the sketch:

• A husband (Dan Aykroyd) and wife (Gilda Radner) argue about what the product actually is —
  is it a floor wax… or is it a dessert topping?
• Chevy Chase, playing the product pitchman, eventually declares:
  “New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!” — and sprays it on a mop and a dessert to demonstrate.

It was a completely absurd ad spoof, poking fun at over-the-top marketing claims and products that try to be everything to everyone.

🧠 How It Became Business/Evaluation Humor

Over time this SNL joke entered broader American business and engineering culture as a lighthearted metaphor:

• When someone proposes a new product, project, or idea that seems like it’s trying to be too many unrelated things at once, folks will quip “Is it a floor wax or a dessert topping?”
• The implication is: is this thing clearly one specific useful thing — or is it trying to do multiple different things that don’t clearly fit together? It’s a way of flagging fuzzy product definition or scope creep.

In other words, your internal Microsoft use of the phrase is a typical example of how the humor from that sketch got repurposed into a shorthand for product strategy evaluation.