MS Hires The Salesman Who Won Munich For SUSE

ron_ivi writes "In a move reminiscent of the 1997 MSFT/Borland Lawsuits, Microsoft has hired the SUSE sales guy who won Munich for SUSE. So if you want a job in this tough job market, just be wildly successful at your current job and Microsoft will come recruit you. (Another interesting Microsoft hire is the chair of the ISO C++ standards body as their VisualC++.NET architect.) Personally I think it's great that they recognize talented individuals and reward them well."

Comments

it's war

[jacquesm]

Yes, it's war, and microsoft is not above recruiting the enemy's best lieutenants.

Re:it's war

[DaHat]

We call that corporate raiding when not referring to 'war' and it is a quite old and hated practice (at least when your offices are raided). Say all the ill you want about MS for doing this, but they are doing what any company would do, hiring the best people they can to do the job!

Re:it's war

[Technician]

Say all the ill you want about MS for doing this, but they are doing what any company would do, hiring the best people they can to do the job!


End snip, now to read between the lines...

Is it hiring the best people for the job or is it removing the worst enemy from active duty?

Someone who is honest and displays a fair comparison between products may not be your best recruit for the job of promoting spin.

Re:it's war

[shawn(at)fsu]

An AC said it best. He is a sales man afterall.
honest and displays a fair comparison between products

When does any sales person do the above. He is out to make his companies product look better than any other, thats what SuSE paid him to do and thats what Microsoft will pay him to do. I love SuSE, it's been the only distro I use for years but even I can;t say anything bad about this or put this guy up for any honesty award.

Re:it's war

[kiwimate]

Yes, it's war, and microsoft is not above recruiting the enemy's best lieutenants.

Oh grow up. You could just as easily spin this as Linux's best evangelists are mercenaries with no integrity; they can be bought by the enemy.

It's business. RTFA and don't skip the bits about Juniper recruiting from Cisco, EMC recruiting from HP, etc. Guess what -- for all the childish railing against MS, they actually can't force someone to work for them. Can MS throw money at someone? Sure. Can a target of their recruitment strategy say no? Of course.

And, by the way, I'm guessing MS probably didn't ring him up and offer him a job right away. Usually you start by feeling out if someone is interested before you start talking dollars. You can be aggressive in your negotiations, but he could always have just said no right at the beginning. Right? So why isn't this story headlined Traitor defects to the enemy MS camp?

Re:it's war

[E-Rock]

The best salesmen actually believe their own bullshit. Doesn't make them any less slimey.

Re:it's war

[dasmegabyte]

Is it hiring the best people for the job or is it removing the worst enemy from active duty?

I think it's obviously both.

Someone who is honest and displays a fair comparison between products may not be your best recruit for the job of promoting spin.

How do we know he's honest? How do we know he's showing fair comparisons? It's entirely possible that he LIED to Munich about the robustness of SuSE, the completeness of compatibility, the time to install, etc. It's likely that he spun the competing products as costly packages that don't innovate like Linux doeso. It's probable he spread FUD about forced paid upgrades, deplorable security, unrepaired bugs and expensive support.

Of course, a lot of the people around here would call that an honest and fair comparison, but it's really spin in the opposite direction. There is no inherently "better" OS or development philosophy. Analyzing the software packages available and whether they meet your needs is the job of a consultant. The job of a sales person is to skew your needs and exagerate how they're met by the software he's selling. He did that for SuSE, he'll do it for Microsoft.

Which is why I prefer to avoid salesmen and "partnered" consultants wherever possible. If a guy's got a big Cisco logo on his business card, chances are he's not going to sell you a D-Link hub, even if that's what you need.

Makes Sense

[Stormcrow309]

Microsoft is well known for their great hiring practices. I know quite a few of thier employees and they all are some of the best in the fields they specialise in. MS is pretty good at weeding out the chaff.

In Sales

[millahtime]

In sales it's all about making the money. I bet M$ will pay him better then anyone else has the ability to. Not a bad deal for him.

Re:In Sales

[wintermind]

Commissions are based in large part on the size of the market into which you are selling your product. The opportunity to earn large commissions is far greater for a salesman working for Microsoft than one working for SuSE. We as a community may not like that, but ultimately the only way to change that is to put our money where our mouths are.

Reducing the threat?

[motorsabbath]

Personally I think it's great that they recognize talented individuals and reward them well.

Or did they hire him to make him less of a threat?

Be wildly successful

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you want a job in this tough job market, just be wildly successful at your current job...

Thanks for turning the obvious into yet another anti-MS rant. Perhaps you should go into the inspirational poster business.

Yeah, so

[UrgleHoth]

Why not hire those you think are best if you can afford them? And I'm not seeing these people being conscripted.

Integrity

[Espectr0]

So people trusted this guy to switch 10k machines to linux. Now, how will people look at his face when he is promoting windows OVER linux? Seems there isn't such thing as integrity.

Bill Gate's biggest flaw

[composer777]

isn't that he won't eventually give it all away or do some good, I believe him when he says that he will. However, people like Gates and those that run Microsoft have very little faith in people. Their arrogance is hard to beat. Even for such wildly successful people as those new hires, I wouldn't doubt for a second that they are getting a mere fraction of what Microsoft makes off them. Why would a proposed philanthropist such as Gates withhold all that cash, even from their "wildly successful" new hires? I think the answer is simple, he doesn't have faith in people to do the right thing with that money. This is of course if we take Gates at his word when he says he wants to help people with that money. While Bill Gates may eventually give talented people a chance, the damage he has done to the system by hoarding all that cash and unfairly eliminating competition far outweighs the benefits that will happen when he does give it away.

Re:Bill Gate's biggest flaw

[aeoo]

I think you make a great point. I just wanted to add my 2 cents.

It's not just about hoarding. Many rich people don't have all that much ready to spend cash (but still way, way more than I can dream about). It's all about control. A rich person has a lot of say on who does what, what goes where, what gets developed and what is canned, and so on. They get streets named after themselves or their properties. Some use their own name as a brand name in an ultimate display of vainglory. They have the ear of other rich people and they form a social network that's not very accessible to "regular" folks. So not only do they have control over their own "domain", but they greatly impact "domains" of other rich people via their decisions and social communication.

This kind of problem is a problem of culture in my opinion. It's only solvable via education and evolution. People have to see in their hearts the damage they do with their selfishness and unrestrained ambition. Because as we well know, when one set of people tries to control another set of people by political power, it doesn't work. That change has to come from the inside of each person.

so?

[kperrier]

why is this news? He quit SuSE in 2003 and he got a new job.

Re:Good question

[cowbutt]

...and besides, it would not be the "open-source community" that is having difficulties delivering - it would be SuSE. The buck stops with them and any of their partners who signed the contract.

--

Re:BORG!

[DaHat]

You have no idea how business works do you? You don't buy a competitor who is/has beating/beaten you to destroy them, you buy them in order to use their assets/skills/tech/etc for your own purposes. Only a fool destroys their betters! If you knew anything about business you would know it is in your best interest to hire the best people you can, yes, they might be a threat, they could destroy you from the inside and leave you hanging... but that is far better then the alternative of hiring your inferiors and being safe and secure, firm in the knowledge that they can never harm you and take your job/company/business/etc.

Never trust a man who gets paid on commission...

[spiritraveller]

Do you honestly believe he was working for SUSE because of the wonderful greatness that is Linux and the Open Source community?

Sales is about selling... it has precious little to do with making the world a better place.

Microsoft shill revealed

[amightywind]

Herb Sutter mentions planned C++/.Net CLR extensions being discussed for later inclusion in the C++ standard in last months C/C++ Journal. (Sorry, there is no link on their site yet.) I thought it odd that the chairman of such a standards board would mention M$ proprietary software so favorably. Then I saw that he works for M$ and understood perfectly. No conflicts of interest here. Enough to make you sick. I wonder what Stroustoup thinks of this. What next? A Microsoftie on Sun's Java steering committee perhaps?

Re:The moral of the story

[stratjakt]

How is that the moral of the story?

Dude showed himself to be a hell of a salesman, and a big corp took notice, and came and offered him a metric assload of cash to come work for them.

Re:BORG!

[Chewie]

Who says you can't do both? This way they get the best of both worlds: They have him, and can use his talents. Meanwhile, SuSE has to scramble to find someone of comparable ability, or lose ground. You *can* have your cake and eat it too!

*That's* how successful corporate raiding works.

What to call this

[raider_red]

There's a very simple term for this kind of hiring. It's called "smart business". If somone proves that they can do something great for your competitors, like pull off a massive sales coup, then that's the kind of guy you want on your staff. The same applies to engineering, politics, and a host of other enterprises.

For example, the guy who designed the S2000 for Honda designed the 300ZX turbo for Nissan. (Both are benchmark designs for the auto industry.) David Gergen worked for both the Nixon and the Clinton administrations. (He may have worked for Reagan, but I'll need to check to be sure.) Hilary Clinton was president of her college's chapter of the Young Republicans, and technology companies exchange employees regularly.

Uh...

[bonch]

It's called having a job. If you're a salesperson, guess what? You sell what you're HIRED TO SELL!

Only on Slashdot, made up mostly of college students and unemployed, would it be considered a bad thing and a "lack of integrity" to sell things for one company and then go over and sell things for another.

It's not like the rest of the world views everything as "Windows vs. Linux" like you do. It's just another product the guy's gonna be selling. More power to him! The anti-capitalism mindset that permeates around here is so silly sometimes.

Re:Uh...

[IamTheRealMike]

Only on Slashdot, made up mostly of college students and unemployed, would it be considered a bad thing and a "lack of integrity" to sell things for one company and then go over and sell things for another.

Depends on the job, and how you sell things. If you're selling second hand cars and you move to another state to sell them for a better salary, most people would not consider you lacking in integrity.

What we have here is different - only somebody incredibly naive would think that this guy made the sale of SuSE without once trashing or mentioning the bad points of Windows: seeing as how they are the closest competition and all. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was the main selling point: Linux is better than Windows because (a) (b) (c).

Now the guy is going to be telling people the exact opposite. In other words, at one or other of the jobs (most likely both) the guy will have been flat out lying.

To be frank, I don't give a toss that the guy is in sales. There's right and then there's wrong, and if you are are lying through your teeth to make a sale you're still a lier. If you are influencing huge, important decisions people make on the basis of things you don't believe yourself .... well, in my world view you have no integrity and your job position does not excuse that.

I'm not saying this guy has no integrity! I don't know what his sales technique is like. It's possible all he did was point out how great SuSE Linux is, and how it'd meet their needs better and didn't mention Microsoft once. It's possible, but unlikely.

In other words, ad hominem attacks lack honour and integrity - and by the way bonch, that holds true whether you're attacking products, people or places.

I call bullshit.

[IANAAC]

A very brief peek of Microsoft's career website shows that that's probably not Microsoft's standard practice. For one, do a job search on their page. A LOT ot bachelor's degrees there. Second, have a peek at their tuition reimbursement page.

Re:Good job offers

[bogie]

"I have nothing against Linus, but he makes decisions for Linux primarily based on the idea that it's a "hacker's OS""

I think that's a bit of a stretch. Linus isn't dumb you know. He is well aware where Linux is being used and is very much interested in getting Enterprise Level features into the kernel. Look at all of the scalibility work that's gone on since 2.0. Do you think that Linus thinks this is so that some code junkie can mess around with his machine at home? Contrary to what you implied the Linux kernel is driven by market forces. Look at the impact that SGI, IBM etc have had since they got involved. Big business has made it very clear what they need and the kernel hackers have answered. I'm not implying that they or Linus are some sort of corporate lacky, but they are not coding with blinders on either.

Maybe somehow I'm in the wrong here, but your version of how Linus views the kernel seems like a view from 1994. Your right, he probably doesn't *care* about Microsft or world domination, but don't think that the kernel isn't very much driven by corporate and market needs at this point.

Re:How long before

[An Onerous Coward]

The difference is, Microsoft caught onto this idea only after a decade of giving everyone complete rights to everything. Don't think that tradition isn't relevant.

Last Christmas, my mom got herself a laptop. I tried to set it up right, with her as a limited user with access to an administrative account. A couple of months back, my brother installed a wireless card on my mom's laptop. But the software installed kept popping up this message box every thirty seconds. After a good deal of hunting, the only solution my brother could find was to give mom's account full administrative privileges. The software simply assumed that it had write access to the registry.

Multiply that by thousands of lazy application writers, each demanding elevated privileges for common user tasks, and suddenly Microsoft has this huge cultural inertia to overcome.

Whether widespread adoption of Linux will drag it in the opposite direction remains to be seen. Though, given the whole "Lindows" thing, I'm certainly concerned.