Microsoft's Windows supremo Terry Myerson is now Terry BYE-rson Windows supremo Terry Myerson is departing Microsoft after decades of service, according to a memo sent to all employees today by CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella is attempting yet another reorganisation at the software giant, creating two new engineering teams to take the business into the future. Familiar names such as Panos Panay …
"See ya ol' pal"
I only hope that he got a good severance package to see him through to retirement.
In any organisation, you need people who say "Excuse me but..." to those in charge and having only echo chambers and mirrors means that everyone will eventually fall over a commercial cliff together sometime.
and making space for more 'nodding donkey yesmen'. So no one will disagree with SatNad as he leads the company into the wilderness (for longer than Moses).
One of my old employers has been MS through and through since the W3.11 days. Now they are moving to an ABM (Anything but Microsoft) model. The 2016/17 price rises hit them hard. For security reasons they can't put anything in the cloud. Now they are going Linux for servers and MacOS for desktops. This has been on the cards since Windows 8 came out.
I suspect that they are not alone.
They're not alone. I had the misfortune of working there a few years ago and soon after I began switching myself and my family to using Android phones and MacOS/Linux desktops. I have one old Windows laptop left because one of my clients is paying me to write Windows code. Windows 8/RT/10/Phone was probably the nail in the MS coffin for a lot of people.
@AC - They are not alone. Too much aggravation and arrogance coupled with a disdain for users' needs is sowing the seed for a rebellion. Bloat 10 is despised by much of the masses for various reasons. The masses are only being 'loyal' because they do not understand what their options really are.
"and making space for more 'nodding donkey yesmen'"
this would NOT surprise me in the LEAST. Apparently whoever it is with the "vision" over at Micro-shaft is clearing out anyone who won't go along with it. This has been going on for a while, since Win-10-nic. If you're not on-board with the market-hype, and "all excited" about whatever new, shiney comes down the pike, I'd suspect your job is on the line and you might want to consider sending out your resume before you get pink-slipped... like a bunch of product testers a few years ago, when some "mensa candidate" over at Micro-shaft *FELT* that they did not NEED people to test; after all, they have END USERS for that!
and so on.
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Always find long served MS bods fascinating.
The pain and hell they must go thru.
Especially these days where you have long employed a softie in their 40s surrounded by a young bunch of diverse UX experts.
Fortunately most long employed bods can cash out and sit on a beach for the next 40 years.
They didn't fire Myerson after his first project cratered. In this day and age a zero defects mentality when it comes to employee performance seems all too common, and leads to risk aversion and group think. At least it looks like there was some flexibility for Myerson, at least once.
Have to strike a balance of course because at the other extreme a high tech firm is not an employment house for the villiage idiots.
I get the impression Satya Nadella is an impatient man, who expects results quickly and quits just just as quickly. Microsoft has been on something of a downward spiral since Gates stepped down. Mobile has been particularly bad for them. Going from being a player, to a nobody, was particularly sloppy of them. It's a good job Microsoft has the flawed Office 365, and Azure, to sustain itself in the long term. The new ideas either aren't working or aren't being given the time and energy to work.
The entire problem is to do with people (as ever it was in business).....you have 2 camps of people....the oldies, that are fixed in their ways, and stick to what they know i.e. using WIN32, writing in C++, assembler, etc.....or the "young" hip people, that are fixed in their ways of using just web technology, and have little experience in the low level nuts and bolts involved in an operating system etc. They need people in the middle ground that know the ENTIRE stack, from top to bottom....I would guess they have very few people like that, that. And there lies the problem...you get projects, and people trying to defend and promote their own camps, rather than promote what is the best technology to create a reliable and innovative product. Thus you get silly things like neglecting desktop development, because web is the cool thing to do, and you get arbitrary engineering decisions. Then you have the wars between the camps within camps like DevDiv and WinDev.....WinDev don't feel like it is their responsibility to provide services underneath to absolutely nail NET performance...or act as an actual barrier to enabling DevDiv to do it themselves - for example....a "native" low level garbage collecting memory system service.
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