Another Microsoft departure: Chris Wilson has left Microsoft to join Google

Wow. Guess wrapping up IE9 means big changes for the development team.

http://cwilso.com/2010/09/21/on-to-a-new-stage/

I think this has been the worst ever year in terms of them losing talent that I have ever seen. Brad Abrahms, Luca Bolognese, J Allard, Paolo M, Charlie Calvert, Adam Kinney, Bea Costa...

the developers are rarely in one company for many years

PS.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/16/google-voice-cofounder-departs/

@Dovella: Larry being the exception that confirms the rule, of course.

The grass is always greener (and I guess sometimes maybe it is)

2 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

@Dovella: Larry being the exception that confirms the rule, of course.

Well, he's been there so long it'd probably be announced as Microsoft leaves Larry, rather than the other way around.

As an outsider, I haven't a clue about Chris's motives but I do find it strange for folks who have focused their careers around web standards and technology would leave at time when Microsoft is expected to have 90% of its employees working on cloud related projects by the end of this year.

@USArcher: So it only takes 10% of their staff to write Windows 8, Visual Studio 11, .NET 5.0, SQL Next Verion, Office 14, XBox, WindowsPhone 7 (though that will be a cloud device)?

53 minutes ago, USArcher wrote

As an outsider, I haven't a clue about Chris's motives but I do find it strange for folks who have focused their careers around web standards and technology would leave at time when Microsoft is expected to have 90% of its employees working on cloud related projects by the end of this year.

What exactly has "cloud related projects" anything to do with "web standards and technology"?

@vesuvius: That figure came from Steve Ballmer earlier this year when the press picked up on his "we're all in" line.  Perhaps what he meant to say was 90% of all product groups are looking to leverage the cloud in their next releases.  In any case, these are exciting times.

@vesuvius: That figure came from Steve Ballmer earlier this year when the press picked up on his "we're all in" line.  Perhaps what he meant to say was 90% of all product groups are looking to leverage the cloud in their next releases.  In any case, these are exciting times.

Leaves for Google

Don't forget Douglas Purdy leaving for Facebook, primarily for the work that Facebook is doing with the Graph API.

Which imo is something that the Data team at MS should be looking at strongly.  It is a weakness within the sql relational database system (which is interesting given the name that the rdbms is given is that relations have the least most complicated implementation in a rdbms)

DouglasH

Bill Hills departure was bad. Screen readability in Windows has a long way to go. Especially with the pushback of directwrite.

Hopefully the Windows Search team doesn't leave for Google, I want Google Search to continue to have a point... I hope the Windows Search team leave for Facebook, and they hire some interns instead. They cannot do any worse.

Speaking of which we've just about to deployed a Windows Search alternative throughout the company, which more or less is a piece of software that, you know, searches files in a folder of your choosing. It is almost as good as Windows 95's search before the "improvements."