Sinofsky Dismisses Trying To Take Over Windows Phone, Developers 70
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."
It doesn't need Sinofsky... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Simply Marvelous! (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
We do most of that just fine - generating our native C++11 Visual Studio solutions and projects with CMake (along with the XCode OSX and iOS versions).
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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.
Good tool =/= universal tool.
Why would someone use VS for cross-platform development? Why bring that as a tool characteristic? That's a little bit red-herringnish. For .NET development, it is an awesome tool. For cross-platform development, then one should use something else (I prefer flopping back and forth Eclipse CDT and vim/ctags in such cases.)
Saying that a hammer is not a good tool for not being good at smearing cream cheese on delicate whole-wheat crackers is equally kind of weird.
Like any tool, it has advantages and drawbacks
And that is imp
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Oh, they're still right. It's just Microsoft's a decrepit has-been that can't get it up anymore and has no real chance of taking over the world or anything else beyond slow miserable decline into infirmity, incontinence, and incoherence. It's the Ballmer Way(tm).
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you want to see TFS 2012... its one large blank canvas with a few bits of text here and there, no rhyme or reason for it, just minimalist and unhelpful. It also doesn't help that the menus are deliberately hidden away with no real hints that there's something to click on (on the web view that is). In the explorer, the menu items are scattered all over various menus - try setting security on the iterations.. hint: its not in the "security settings" menu item.
Microsoft will take this opportunity to focus on t
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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!
You know you can change the color and font scheme with an extension?
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourColorfulVisualStudio2012WithTheColorThemeEditorVS2010ColorsToo.aspx [hanselman.com]
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I disagree on the dinosaur. All they have to do is enter the same mindset of the windows era. "We suck, but let's steal/copy what's already on the market and let our customer do what they please with our platform, even pirate us. Once we get the market we'll shaft them with compound interest".
And people is likely to fall for it again.
One thing I'd do, though, is use another corporation. Money is de facto anonymous, untraceable, transferable with the speed of light, why bother with a name which is mostly kn
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The problem is, Windows won the UI war at that time because they were the cheapest OS that did the job. Android already has that niche in the mobile market, unless Microsoft start paying people to ship Windows on their devices.
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Windows has become the Mac of the latest OS wars.
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MS makes a ton of money off of Android through patent licenses.
Cool. So they can lay off all the Windows developers and just become a patent troll.
Flat stock price for how many years now? (Score:2)
The empire is in decline (Score:2)
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 manufactur
Sounds like ... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are no growth opportunities left (look up MSFT), so the rat next to you starts to look mighty tasty.
What does the eye command? (Score:5, Funny)
There is only one Lord of the Ring, only one who can bend it to his will. And he does not share power.
Or maybe...... (Score:2)
Or maybe he was just an ass hole
Or maybe....
this could go on for ever.
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Maybe he had all the chairs removed from Ballmer's office as a prank.
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caught banging some intern on Ballmer's desk.
Chances are all his boss saw
was just an ass hole
Malarkey? (Score:1, Troll)
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...
I been tricked. (Score:2)
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.
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What nonsense! (Score:4, Funny)
"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?
Jobs reincarnate? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Wouldn't it be funny if he went and started a company (let's say 'After') which implements his ideas for an OS based on a BSD kernel, completely uninhibited by MS bureaucracy. A few years down the track MS is floundering and Ballmer has been booted. Sinofsky comes back and replaces Windows UI with that from After and the rest becomes history?
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Boycotting thread due to slashdot linking to itself. Stop the stupidty.
You viewed the discussion and then you went a step further and commented in the discussion. You aren't very good at boycotting.
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Good Point. Maybe this is a sit in?
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I think the only thing you can really do to impact them is to start spamming a thread, not just alone, but with lots of members, and don't do it as an AC, let them know it is members of this site that are upset.
They'll ban you, but you'll probably make an impact.
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Yeah, not doing that. Just registering my dislike through the offtopic post. At some point I'll problably get fed up and head to greener pastures.
He probably just got sick of the crap.. (Score:2)
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 [businessweek.com]
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.
Wouldn't surprise me if both sides are right. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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A lot of people say that - Sinofsky is seen as "being difficult to work with", but given that at various places where he gave tech presentations and was ready to answer any question, you have to think "difficult" means "an effective leader who actually does stuff" (besides brown-nose superiors and empire-build that is) and that pissed off the political arse-lickers.
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Would you prefer the word "divisions"? I've met so many with your attitude which by the way, I find perplexing.
People use the word silos precisely because it refers to the invisible lines that dot and separate the political landscape. Silo is a political term that players use precisely because they are talking politics. Clearly this makes you uncomfortable. It's certainly not to offend your back office, apolitical sensibilities.
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My experience working with WinDiv in Windows 8 was that their idea of collaboration was: You! Lackey group! You will do this random thing I want right now!
What? No, I don't care about your schedule, I am WINDOWS!!!!
No, we won't tell you what we want, we'll just tell you it's wrong after it's too late to change it!
Now bow, bow before WINDOWS!
Personality clashes (Score:2, Interesting)
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"
windows 8 is failing in the marketplace (Score:1)
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The question then becomes: Is he responsible for the abortion, or is Windows 8 the way it is due to the people who considered him to be abrasive and controlling?
If he is responsible, as well as being controlling and abrasive, I'm hoping he was kicked out so fast that his ass left scorch marks on the pavement.
If he was forced to compromise with fools who forced that outcome, then he may well be better off somewhere else, because those idiots apparently mistook trying to keep control over his own projects as
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Windows 8 can be seen a a lot of things, and I doubt Sinofsky was the sole dictator who had everything made to his personal design. that's not quite the way things work, however....
guess who the new head of Windows div is? Julie "Ribbon" Larson-Green..... also the same person who was responsible for... well, guess. [fastcodesign.com]
"Unlike other companies that maybe have one person at the top, we don't have a [design] czar at Microsoft," says Julie Larson-Green, VP of program management for Windows. Of Metro, she adds, "Its not like Steve [Ballmer] decreed it." One former longtime Microsoft manager put it bluntly: "I don't think Steve could even spell the word design." And unlike Steve Jobs, who was infamous for meddling in every detail of Apple's product launches, Ballmer didn't go to any of the rehearsals at Milk Studios for the unveiling of the Surface; his part was played by a stand-in till he arrived on the day.
So if the brass were so indifferent to design, how did this thinking emerge at Microsoft at all?
In May 2009, Julie Larson-Green corralled 150 thought leaders from various Microsoft groups (Office, Phone, Bing, Xbox) in the Redmond, Washington, campus conference center to kick off planning for Windows 8.