Another Microsoft Exec Steps Down

Arcanimus writes "On Tuesday, the corporate vice president of Windows Live and MSN marketing, Martin Taylor, announced that he is leaving Microsoft. Just three months ago, Taylor was appointed to his new position to manage the marketing of Windows Live. In his 13 years with the company, Taylor even worked directly with CEO Steve Ballmer."

Interesting...

[Cleon]

Big shake-up going on at Microsoft. I wonder if this is related to Limbo Longhorn, or if something else is in the works. Change in direction, maybe?

probably because ...

[Anonymous Coward]

is it because windows live sucks?

they were supposed to launch some 'new' (gmail competing) hotmail -

they ask you if you want to try hotmail live beta, and you agree ... but it's not new, it still sucks.

how do you think hotmail would be faring had should they still be running qmail and solaris?

they still would've had to inovate in UI, features and disk space.

sinking ship?

[EggyToast]

Either there's simply more focus on MS this year, or something is up -- why would they all be leaving prior to Vista's launch? Especially all of these "no comment" departures. Gates' reduction in responsibility makes sense, but these other guys seem to be in rather important roles ("head blogger," "exec responsible for Google competition," etc) and are bailing out. I could understand if they had people lined up for these positions, but it seems like they're just leaving.

Jumping Ship?

[ironring2006]

Is it just me or does it seem like a lot of people are jumping ship now? Has Microsoft finally spread themselves too thin? Have they become so huge now that they don't even know what to do with themselves under the multiple multiple layers of complexity? Anyone else forsee a large implosion in the foreseeable future? Maybe those that are smart enough realize that they are fighting a losing battle against Google, Linux, and OSS. Then again, they may just to enjoy their million$.

Microsoft should spin-out branches

[boxlight]

The best thing that Microsoft could do for itself is spin-out their products into separate spin off companies.

Windows, Inc.

Office, Inc.

MSN, Inc.

Visual Studio, Inc.

XBox, Inc.

The smaller companies would be more nimble and would have to be more competative. They'd be better performers as they wouldn't have the mother organization as a cruch.

boxlight

Too late

[slashflood]

I just submitted the following story:

Suddenly and unexpected, the corporate vice president of Windows Live and MSN, Martin Taylor has left Microsoft [bloomberg.com]. "We've made the difficult decision to part ways with Martin, but we don't comment on personnel matters," Microsoft said in a statement Tuesday. Taylor, the former Global General Manager of Platform Strategy rose to prominence as the face behind Microsoft's "Get the Facts" anti-Linux campaign. You can read the Slashdot [slashdot.org] interview with Martin Taylor here [slashdot.org].

Re:Is this good or bad?

[Spiked_Three]

The evil was from the marketing guy jeff raikes (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/jeff/defa ult.mspx). He was from apple. The marketing people (and to some extent the HR people) were the most evil people I have ever worked for or with in my life. No holes barred get the sale no matter who you have to kill attitude.

Raikes perfected the pre-canned answer to every question that gates and balmer soon adopted. Talking to anyone of them is like pressing buttons on a child's speak and spell toy - there is absolutely no thought behind what they say, just pr department approved pre-canned responses.

Gates was a good guy. Balmer is a hot head that is out of his league but because of his friendship with bill and bill's desire to get out of it, balmer has had the lead for a while.

But again, i reiterate, the evil is from the ruthless marketing leadership. Unfortunately they got the job done.

Cringely's predictions

[rduke15]

Sounds like Cringely may have been right in his last column [pbs.org]:

"So IF THEY DO IT THE RIGHT WAY, [...]look for several dozen of his closest and oldest associates to leave the company in the next four to six weeks, and look for Steve Ballmer to leave, too, within a year."

Re:Is this good or bad?

[slindseyusa]

As evil as Microsoft is, I've never been able to decide whether or not Bill Gates himself is evil.

Penn Jillette (from Penn and Teller) had a good take on this during a radio interview I heard a while ago. He said that these people truly think they are doing the right thing. They are not inherently evil, even if their actions end up seeming that way. In the end it is a skewed view of the individual, not someone being actively evil.

Of course he was talking about George Bush, not Bill Gates, but the intent translates.

Re:Jumping Ship?

[mqj]

You are not the only one who thinks that lots of people are leaving.

"...look for several dozen of his closest and oldest associates to leave the company in the next four to six weeks, and look for Steve Ballmer to leave, too, within a year."

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060615. html [pbs.org]

Re:Interesting...

[Dionysos Taltos]

Yes. I think it's safe to say a change in direction is at hand.

Wired had an article last October which spoke to this.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69161,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_7 [wired.com]

As Microsoft hits 30, critics reel off a list of complaints that sounds like, well, a Microsoft commercial: stifling bureaucracy, frustrating miscommunication, different units working on overlapping technology without adequate cooperation. In short, the very ills Microsoft promises to cure with its software.

...

As it gears up to release a slew of new products, Microsoft is trying to untangle bureaucratic snags with a corporate shakeup meant to get the best ideas to market faster and increase the company's push toward over-the-Internet software and services.

...

Microsoft is facing the classic dilemma that befalls a company that grows from a small startup to a major corporation, said the analyst Garrity. There's really no way to manage thousands of employees without a strong corporate structure, but that structure will inevitably alienate some workers who remember the freewheeling early days.

Re:Interesting...

[ergo98]

Big shake-up going on at Microsoft. I wonder if this is related to Limbo Longhorn, or if something else is in the works. Change in direction, maybe?

Executive branches of large organization often work as loyal "teams" these days, which is why the departure of a high-level executive (e.g. CEO) often quickly leads to the departure of a large number of their underlings as well. Not only do they often resist the inevitable change, but the new guy/gal often wants to feel that they molded things in their own image (rather than carrying on the old guy's legacy), so they gently nudge theh last guys crew out, building their empire from scratch.

Apart from the ascent of Ozzie, and now the virtually immediate department of Bill, a lot of executive level change is afoot. Ballmer's days are almost certainly numbered, and his and Bill's crew know it.

Re:Sounds more like he was canned than resigned

[intrico]

Yes very true. Of course at the executive level in companies, they are usually given the opportunity to resign with grace rather than get fired, except in extreme cases such as those where criminal accusations are involved. IMHO, I think we're seeing a broad (and probably sorely needed) shakeup as a result of all the recent negative publicity [vnunet.com] surrounding the Vista delay, often speculated to be caused by culture issues. Corporate culture issues are difficult to fix in any organization, let alone a huge one like Microsoft, and often necessitate changes starting from the top down to even begin to make progress.

Re:Is this good or bad?

[Tony]

Gates was a good guy.

For some definition of "good," perhaps. Everything I've heard and observed about the guy inidicates he hasn't been a good guy since about 7th grade, when the girls made fun of him for being a pussy.

Gates cheated Paul Allen out of 1/6 stake in Microsoft. Later, when Allen was dying of cancer and overwork on MS-DOS, Gates and Ballmer discussed how to get Allen's stock back if he were to die.

Gates gave almost nothing to charity until he married Melinda, and was publicly ridiculed for being selfish with his money.

There are thousands of little examples like this that indicate he is not a "good" guy, and perhaps never was. Jeff Raikes may have been the most evil guy at Microsoft, but the Gates-worship that went on at Microsoft provided an environment in which Raikes' practices were acceptable.

Re:Microsoft should spin-out branches

[ergo98]

IMO, all the products you mentioned above fit well into Microsoft's core-competency

What is Microsoft's "core competency"? If you say "software", that's enormously too vague of a focus, not to mention that it's a hugely diverse marketplace. Building a IM is nothing like building a corporate accounting system.

"What's your core competency?"
"Building things that move."

and make good business sense under the MS umbrella. Also, none of them are too risky, so there is no major threat to shareholder value by keeping them.

• Microsoft product teams have limited leeway in how they implement things, because they need to ensure that what they do doesn't step on other teams too much, that it doesn't limit the sellability of other products (e.g. such as how the IE team was ordered to stop innovating before they uncut the entrenchment of Windows), and that it pushes the agenda of other teams. On the one hand these teams are leveraging the work of other teams, but on the other they have often been hobbled by craptacular implementations they were forced to embrace, running way behind schedule as every slip affects the entire software ecosystem.
• No one trusts Microsoft, and extremely few want to partner with them. Microsoft is finding that every product is getting shunned by the industry because people have bad experiences with Microsoft, not to mention that they almost certainly are current or future competitors of Microsoft in other areas, and they know that every Microsoft initiative has to fit in the grand plan (e.g. a product will be sabotaged if it threatens another product).

It would make tremendous sense for Microsoft to split into a number of companies. The Office team can build the best damn office suite, for example, without requiring incestuous relations with the OS team -- indeed, they could port it to countless platforms, leverage the web even if it undermined Windows lock-in, and so on.

Microsoft Has Improved

[ThinkFr33ly]

At one time, IIS 5 looked hopeless. It was completely riddled with security holes and was basically the joke of the industry. People who used it did so with either ignorance or extreme caution.

Microsoft realized they needed to fix this but it took Code Red and various other major worms that took advantage of IIS to really kick the company into gear.

What was the result of this? IIS 6. IIS 6 is an excellent web server and is one of the most secure web servers you can use. It's certainly the most secure application server you can use. It's had a total of 2 vulnerabilities since its release about 4 years ago. (See: http://secunia.com/product/1438/ [secunia.com]) Add to that the fact that IIS 6 is extremely performant, easily configurable and maintainable, and is very robust, you have to conclude that Microsoft improved. A great deal in fact.

I see the work on Windows Vista and IE 7 being very similar in nature to the work done on IIS. They've completely revamped their development methodologies to focus on security.

IE 7+ (the one that comes with Vista) has a feature that essentially runs the browser as a very low privs user. Any operations that need high privs (such as writing to the user's desktop or other directories) are done by a broker. This broker has only a few thousand lines of code (and is therefore FAR easier to audit for security issues) and runs with the privs of the current user. This is actually fairly innovative and will undoubtedly make it far more difficult to exploit and holes in IE.

Obviously we'll have to wait and see if Microsoft has done with Vista and IE what they did with IIS, but it's hard to deny that Microsoft has proven they can take a product people view as a hopeless security mess and turn it into one of the most secure products on the market.

Re:What did he take when he left

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a thought: Why doesn't slashdot now change the Microsoft icon for stories to Balmer throwing a chair instead of Bill Gates/Locutus of Borg? Balmer chair is pretty much the universal symbol of Microsoft today. It cuts across language, culture, geo-political boundaries and IP addresses...

Re:probably because ...

[Jugalator]

I was surprised how weak as a service "Live" was/is.
(to be fair, there are still plenty of Live services in development)

For those not in the latest-Microsoft-brand loop, Live is set to replace MSN as Microsoft's new online initiative to integrate windows services with Windows. And in these days, since Microsoft is facing fierce competition in the online business from Google, Yahoo! (and not just Yahoo! search, but their Flickr, etc), you'd expect a rather massive and impressive effort from the software giant. If you haven't looked at some of their past products, that is. ;-)

And for such an important initiative in these days when MS probably need to expand their software market from an increasingly complex monolithic OS and Office suite, what do we get?

Well, the most visible ones that are at least available today:
- Windows Live Search, a competitor to Google and Yahoo at best.
- Windows Live Mail, a rebranded Hotmail that's less compatibile than Gmail and many other services.
- Windows Live Local, a rather poor Google Maps competitor, especially if you're looking for *global* coverage.
- Windows Live Messenger, their proprietary IM application in the forest of IM applications.
- Windows Live OneCare, a service where Microsoft have the guts to charge users for basic protection not aimed for the corporate sector, i.e. something other services supply for free. (AdAware / Search & Destroy / AntiVir / AVG / Avast, the list goes on...)

Simply put, I think execs may be looking to leave because working for Microsoft:
- Isn't cool.
- Doesn't make cool stuff.

Re:The appropriate cliche

[Ana10g]

Actually, this has been observed with a lot of different companies in dire straights. Not saying this for sure (as it is only correlation evedence, but you make your own inferences), but when a lot of executives leave, the company is in trouble. Witness Sun Microsystems a few years back when they had tons of executives leaving. The company wasn't on solid footing, and the execs new it, so they began to bail.

If I had to predict, I'd imagine that times will be rough at MS for the next few years, as major image shakedowns and restructurings occur. Hopefully, it'll prove beneficial to the rest of the universe, but I'm not holding my breath. MS is still MS.

Re:Is this good or bad?

[spot]

a recent damning example, Gates quoted in the NYTimes [nytimes.com]:

"When they invented radial tires, they should have shot the guy," he said. "The whole industry went through a crisis, because it took nine years to squeeze out the extra factory capacity, because the tires lasted longer."

ok let's ignore his overtly violent metaphor. focus instead on how he values innovation that saves lives and money.

Re:Is this good or bad?

[SenseiLeNoir]

Bad use of language. I did an "Al Gore", I am sorry.

I meant to say that, When microsoft started attacking Linux, it helped raise the awareness of Linux across many business. Not as a name, but what it does. For example when Microsoft said in their "get the facts" campaign that "Although Linux is 'free', it has higher TCO.....", A lot of companies didnt even KNOW that Linux is freely obtainable, and it helped achieve some thought put towards it.

At the place where I work, We use Linux for a lot of our servers, switching from NT/Solaris, with full support from Management. Management were only aware of Linux thanks to the Microsoft Get The Facts campaign, which led to further analysis, which prooved to them, that in OUR case, going with Linux/OpenSource results in LOWER TCO.

Reap What You Sow

[Anonymous Coward]

microsoft has some challenges going forward. big challenges that, apparently, keep getting bigger.

however, they brought this on themselves. they were one of the "compensation innovators" that spoiled everyone with stock options and the idea that they, regular old employee, would be a millionaire, too.

people are now realizing that the fast has left msft and it is now time to work for more normal wages.

NOT!

when you suck away employees from other companies with the allure of stock riches... you will end up being suckked dry when your stock doesn't have the same allure as other companies.

time to find greener pastures.

it did sound like msft fired this dude, though. perhaps he got an extra couple hundred thousand in order for msft to "market" (ie, L-I-E) about his leaving the company.

Re:Is this good or bad?

[Foofoobar]

Open source did not come about because Microsoft was big; open source came about because they promoted code as being proprietary. Priot to that, people just gave away code. It wasn't until they started selling languages and promoting code as something that could be sold that that people stopped giving away code.

Open source was a response to proprietary code. So in a sense, open source existed prior to Microsoft. Keep in mind that open source is not a business practice... it is a social movement. That social movement can be incorporated into business practices but you should not confuse one for the other.

And while you put forth that Microsoft inadvertently promoted open source again your logic is flawed. It was not their portests that caused it to become popular because by the time Microsoft STARTED protesting, it had already gotten a decent foothold and had a faster adoption rate than any other company out there. No, it was word of mouth, inaction by tech companies and monopolistic practices that DROVE consumers towards open source. And to this day, it is still the three ingredients that push open source.

Should a company decide to make a decent product that doesn't lock you in and interoperates well, it has been proven that people will still buy it. But once a company thinks that consumers don't have choices, won't make choices or are unaware of choices... thats when the consumer backlash begins.

All open source did was taken advntage of the consumer backlash and give it someplace to go.

Re:What did he take when he left

[williambbertram]

He won't need it. Ken Lay has a chair reserved for him. Sorry, every time I hear about top execs leaving big corrupt organazations I think of Enron. Off topic, but I also wonder which of the two companies has ripped America off more?