Almost exactly one year ago today, I wrote this post discussing the impact a change in leadership at Microsoft had on all our lives. The TL;DR version was, two senior VPs at Microsoft went head to head over the future of the company, one lost ( J Allard, father of the Xbox ) and one won, Steven Sinofsky. Well, as of today, it is looking like Microsoft picked the wrong horse!
Simply put, after shipping Windows 8, Steven Sinofsky announced his departure.
This can have a pretty profound effect on future directions at Microsoft. The fallout from J Allards departure were pretty massive. From a developers perspective, lets see… XNA has been axed. Windows Phone 7.x has been axed. Silverlight has been axed. The Courier tablet was axed ( imagine the difference the world would have seen if Microsoft entered the tablet market *before* the iPad??? ). We now have Windows 8 as the target for every device, the Windows Store ( I have a feeling this one is an accountants decision, not Sinofsky’s ). There have even been some micro-level changes as a result. We have the increased focus on C++ and JavaScript at Microsoft, and the decreased focus on .NET.
What’s going to come next? Who knows actually… and that part is kind of scary. Agree with his decisions or not, Sinofsky got stuff done and had vision. Is there a leader remaining? It’s certainly not Ballmer, that man has been making epically stupid knee jerk decisions since taking the helm. ( 34 billion for Yahoo? 8 billion for Skype? ) I really don’t know what is coming next, but I will tell you one thing… up until about 8 months ago, I held Microsoft stock. I sold it and if I held it today, I would be on the phone to my broker now.
That’s the shame too, as Microsoft has managed to recruit some of the best A-list programming talent in the world. Too bad they can’t do the same thing for their management. Then again, you aren’t going to fix management at Microsoft when you have an idiot at the helm… they tried that once bringing Ray Ozzie in and Ballmer pushed him out.
General Totally Off Topic