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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!
There are no growth opportunities left (look up MSFT), so the rat next to you starts to look mighty tasty.
Have gnu, will travel.
Christ. VS is a fantastic development environment. This bullshit where some ass comes out of the woodwork to yell "ZOMG SHILL!%#!" at anyone that makes the mistake of saying they like a msft product, is seriously old and lame.
There is only one Lord of the Ring, only one who can bend it to his will. And he does not share power.
"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?
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.
VS is a fantastic development environment.
It's fine if you're writing code in .net targeted at a Microsoft platform. If you're trying to do something cross platform, or use a different language, or use a Makefile, or Maven, it's not so great.
Like any tool, it has advantages and drawbacks. Anyone who can't see the drawbacks is a blind fanboy.