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Sinofsky Dismisses Trying To Take Over Windows Phone, Developers
Nerval's Lobster writes "When Steven Sinofsky stepped down as head of Microsoft's Windows division earlier this week, multiple publications cited friction with other executives as the primary reason behind the departure. Whether or not that's the case—neither Sinofsky nor Microsoft has offered an official explanation, aside from the usual platitudes—someone with connections to Microsoft is claiming that Sinofsky's departure stemmed from a failed attempt to bring additional parts of the company under his control. 'Steven had apparently lost recent battles to bring both Windows Phone and the Developer Division under his control,' Hal Berenson, president of consulting group True Mountain Group and a former Microsoft executive, wrote in a Nov. 13 blog posting. 'I suspect that he saw those [losses] both as a roadblock to where he wanted to take Windows over the next few years, and a clear indication that his political power within Microsoft had peaked.' The departure, he added, was the 'outgrowth of conflict.' Berenson's claim was enough to draw Sinofsky himself into the discussion. In the comments section below the posting, Sinofsky left a short note suggesting that rumors of a multi-product takeover were, frankly, malarkey."
Visual Studio 2010 was awesome. Visual Studio 2012 is a sea of all caps menus, grey and such a minute dash of colour that makes partially sighted people like me wonder if they hallucinated it or got up too fast...
Seriously MS, fix it, along with the Coal Bunker/Snow Blindness colour schemes. I am not on a beach in Malibu, or the cockpit of a B2 on a bombing mission FFS!
Visual Studio 2010 was awesome.
*touches your face in complete disbelief to make sure you're real and not a hologram*
... it's amazing how perfectly Ballmer has designed his new robots!!!
It's
as guys keep trying to "reinvent" this MS dinosaur.
There are no growth opportunities left (look up MSFT), so the rat next to you starts to look mighty tasty.
Have gnu, will travel.
There is only one Lord of the Ring, only one who can bend it to his will. And he does not share power.
Windows 8 and rt is shaping up to be a monumental vista....
So someone had to take the blame... Sinofsky was just in the right spot when the chair got thrown.
Or maybe he was just an ass hole
Or maybe....
this could go on for ever.
Seriously, who cares.
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
I have to tell you, I am almost feeling sorry for MS. They were the evil empire for so long, now they don't even rate as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.
What is all that noise? It must be all that barking from the seven seals...
Given the wording of the link, I thought it would take us to the actual post and comments in question. Instead I was tricked into visiting slashcloud. That's almost as bad as a rickrolling.
Previously posted here.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"Sinofsky left a short note suggesting that rumors of a multi-product takeover were, frankly, malarkey."
I suspect that he also denies being a reptoid, craving the taste of raw human flesh, or having grown from spores. Why would this be any different?
I can't help but think this whole thing sounds eerily reminiscent of Steve Jobs (not in every way but..) in that this guy presided over the release of Windows 7, the best windows we've seen in a long time (I'm withholding judgement on windows 8 unlike many until it's had time in the market to prove one way or another, could be awful iduno), and the personality traits that are attributed to him sound very much in line with Jobs, and now he gets the boot... Will we see him come back in 5 or 10 years just to run MS to a new glory day? Who knows, if so, let's just hope he doesn't DRMurder all the consumers in the future like Jobs did...
Stephen or Steven or whatever left because his penis was exceptionally large. Gates and especially Ballmer couldn't handle such a large penis. Steven just couldn't fit in ...to the corporate strategy.
It's sad but true.
P.S. Could I go to jail in Britain for this post?
Boycotting thread due to slashdot linking to itself. Stop the stupidty.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Put your self in his position..
You have been with MS for 24 years.. you pull down roughly 8.5 mill a year with pay and stock options
He probably has a nice pile of cash and stock to last him a lifetime or two.
The stress may be higher than the rewards and you got that last major release off your solders.
Time to step back, have fun with the family and find a new direction.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
It might be that Sinofsky was actually causing friction by trying to get different divisions to work together - and that this was viewed internally by some people as a 'power grab' - i.e., something that would loosen the reins of their own power.
Big companies can get very silo'd off, and the different silos can then become little empires. So then when someone comes along whose work and position touches a few different silos and tries to get some actual inter-silo planning and less duplication of effort, territoriality, etc. then pushback can happen.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
He has let the company stagnate horrendously and is obviously lacking in any vision of the future. Microsoft's fallen far behind and failed to adapt quickly to new markets and by all appearances doesn't even attempt to innovate. How much market cap have they ceded since he took over?
Ah, the smell of a fresh character assassination. How lovely.
I know nothing of Microsoft politics, but the wording of this is suspect. I expect what it really means is that Sinofsky was effective, had a clear vision and there were lots of people at MS who wanted to interfere with it. All too often in large organizations "abrasive and off-putting" simply means "states what he thinks without embellishment". "Aggressively maintaining control" can translate as "told me my ideas sucked" and "putting up roadblocks" means "caught me when I tried to go around him".
Some years ago I'd have taken these sorts of statements at face value, but having recently been denied a promotion on similar grounds I'm getting very cynical about it. All too often a team or individual comes up with an proposal or process that simply isn't good, and when given polite feedback responds with something like, "Thanks for the feedback, we'll take it on board". Then they ignore it and come back the next week asking why their awesome idea didn't get implemented yet. The feedback is re-iterated more directly in the hope of the message sinking in, the same response is received. Eventually the answer becomes "No, because this idea won't work" and they get offended. Now you have communication issues.
People often forget that communication is two way. It's important to be good at sending and not being unnecessarily dickish or hurtful. But it's also important to be able to receive, and especially when dealing with people who have an engineering background (like Sinofsky does) to be able to take direct and clear feedback that you don't like. It's very common in engineering, especially software engineering, to have everything you do be reviewed in detail and for things to be clearly right or wrong. Many people outside of engineering can't handle this. They have sometimes gone their entire lives without ever having an idea or proposal rejected for being objectively wrong, and when it happens, they can't take it. Seen it so many times. And Ballmer is a salesman by background.
Somehow I doubt Sinofsky was really a giant cock as the quote implies, how would he have had such a long and successful career if he was genuinely a nasty person? He'd have been washed out a long time ago. Far more likely is that some people who did not have his experience or background wanted to do things to Windows that to him were just wrong, and eventually he told them so.
is it really that hard to read between the lines?
SteveSi watched the Vice Presidential debate!
MS's sunk costs in its traditional product lines and costs to maintain hundreds of millions of licensees are probably too large to be truly innovative. Just seems like MS already have seen a bunch of execs come through who were going to "re-invigorate" the company and make it compete in the "post-pc" world. I think the company would be better off taking better care of its existing customer base, and extending support for products like XP for a much longer period. Maybe roll out paid service packs for products like XP and Server 2003 that make them more secure and compatible with newer hardware.
And it's not because of Windows 8, Ballmer, Gates, Sinofsky, or anything Microsoft has or hasn't done. Microsoft's decline is part of a trend affecting every American IT company that tries to sell products to the small, non-enterprise user. Apple might be the exception of the moment, but I suspect it would soon follow in the steps of Dell, HP, and IBM, which sold off its PC business to a little-known Chinese company called Lenovo.
Blame it on East Asia's high-volume manufacturers.
China's hardware manufacturers will soon see software as an added expense that can be more cheaply produced in-house, especially given the wide availability of open-source software like Android and, yes, even GNU/Linux. China might also view with distrust software made chiefly in the US, even if only as a retaliatory gesture for Amercan distrust of Chinese hardware.
It's not a question of "taking over developers" (although I guess there are developers in it.) It's Developer Division, the part of Microsoft that ships Visual Studio.
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