Windows and Office veteran ejects from Microsoft
Instrument of Seinfeld
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
The Microsoft veteran who helped lead development, sales, and marketing on Office and Windows is leaving the company after more than 20 years.
Bill Veghte has "indicated a desire to run a business in a more end-to-end fashion and continue to explore new areas in the broad technology, communication and services sector,s" chief executive Steve Ballmer said Thursday. Veghte leaves the company on January 30.
According to Ballmer, Veghte had been "instrumental in the delivery and launch of Windows 7, helping us reenergize the Windows franchise."
It was Veghte who sold the mysterious Bill-Gates-meets-Jerry-Seinfeld ads as part of a $300m campaign to revive the then Vista tarnished reputation of Microsoft and Windows. The ads left most people simply puzzled.
Veghte had served as senior vice president in Microsoft's Windows division. In that role, he covered business strategy and planning, sales and marketing across Windows, Internet Explorer, and Windows Live, and shared responsibility for OEM sales.
His colleague Steven Sinofsky was named president of the then reorganized Windows group in July 2009, and Microsoft said at the time Veghte would be moving on to a leadership role that would be announced later in the year. It doesn't seem that leadership role materialized and the phrasing of Ballmer's statement suggests Veghte had wanted a more overarching role and may seek a chief executive title outside of Microsoft.
Veghte joined Microsoft in 1990 and helped build the Office franchise from separate application components as an associate product manager. During his time, Veghte also led development of Windows 98, development and marketing for Windows Server, and had led North American sales and services. ®
COMMENTS
I suspect...
...it could also mean "I'd rather own my own small business and control everything end to end as opposed to having good ideas squashed by short sighted financially minded management" ...or the jerks and assholes comment is probably pretty accurate as well.
Euphamism
I think "run a business in a more end-to-end fashion" means "I don't want to work with losers, for assholes".
Not enough
Not enough changes at MS. More heads need to be replaced and Blamer needs to definitely kicked out.
Whilst Win 7 is a success...only because of the massive pent up demand to finally replace a 10 year old operating system with something failry decent, elsewhere MS is failing badly.
Office. Absolute madness that a user cannot choose between the new ribbon and the previous 2003 toolbars. Mad, mad. User inteface is everything and if a worker is trained and experienced in which buttons to press, then just imagine the costs of re-training, mistakes, lost productivity etc.
Windows Mobile. Even as CE it had great potential. I could never figure out why it was not being promoted more. Loved it. Now, despite being a great OS it has completely missed the boat to Apple and Google and Nokia.
MSN. What were they thinking of?! Maybe dumbed down tools for dumbed down yanks? That reminds me of Office 2007!
I could go on, but its sad to see the end of a useful empire, despite all its faults. As for jumping to Apple. Never! Nokia, tried them, never again! Google, tried them, never again, bunch of advertising bandits.
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