Windows Phone GM leaving Microsoft, with a rallying cry

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/windows-phone-gm-leaving-microsoft-rallying-cry-team

by i2o • 15 years ago

43 32 15 years ago

i2o2• 15 years ago

For those who don't know Charlie his contributions include (as listed at http://www.liveside.net/2011/08/08/charlie-kindel-to-leave-m...):

- Founded Premier support

- Built ActiveX and DCOM

- Shipped Internet Explorer 3.0

- Drove the development of the home networking features in Windows XP

- Founded eHome and shipped the first version of Windows Media Center

- Drove the invention of Windows Smart Displays and Windows Media Center Extenders

- Served Bob Muglia as executive technical assistant as he ran the Enterprise Storage business through to him running the Server and Tools Division

- Was the driving force behind Windows Home Server

- Led the design and development of the Windows Phone 7 Application Platform

- Drove the Windows Phone 7 application platform ecosystem development and evangelism effort

mariusmg• 15 years ago

Seriously ? One dude built ActiveX and DCOM ?! Wow...

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

No, he was part of a team.

rimantas2• 15 years ago

Genuine question: are any of these worth to be proud of? Besides the shipping of the actual product.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

Honestly, all of them.

jsz0• 15 years ago

It's a shame that both Windows MCE and Windows Home Server never lived up to their potential. Possibly we can add WM7 to that list in a few years too. I can understand why he's leaving. It must be horrible to develop these really good products and see your company drop the ball on them.

commandar• 15 years ago

WHS was a great idea tied to an awful implementation. I installed a copy through MAPS at work, and I think it lasted all of 15 minutes before I dismissed it entirely; it looked like very little more than Windows Server 2003 with some weakly integrated automation sitting on top.

i2o2• 15 years ago

MCE's challenge (at the time) was the cable networks death grip on the signal. It took years for CableCARD to surface, and even then it was limited in its deployment geographically and provider wise. If that had been solved much quicker I bet we would have seen a larger MCE ecosystem form. Nowadays the world is moving on to online streaming which presents other challenges. Looking at Boxee's solution shows how hard it is to get it to work as smooth as possible. Apple is besting it by brokering deals with content providers, perhaps something Microsoft should have pursued earlier. It's tough when you've heard the internal vision of what it could have been and seen what is has become. There was so much not brought to the public that would have made MCE a staple in the home theatre.

DenisM2• 15 years ago

I can't find a single product on this list that I could say, "yep, that was worth it".

DCOM - a pile of complexity even most Microsoft employees couldn't understand. Different threading models, security problems, you name it. In my early days as Microsoft employee one unfortunate guy decided to implement an app to manage installing latest build of a (different) product and running tests on a couple hundred machines; he spent month fighting DCOM problems.

ActiveX - huge security nightmare in the browsers.

IE3 - don't know, don't remember much.

WMC - windows-based media centers are a failure. Large, noisy, boxes, poor power management, lack of support for MKV in the latest version. Had they done it right there would never be a Roku, and Apple TV would be too late to market. It's failure.

Home server - they should have solved two simple problems: 1) every windows user should have a backup solution according to his budget (starting from $50 and up) 2) every windows user should have a one-click file-sharing solution according to his budget (starting at zero dollars). They failed at both. I guesstimate 90% of windows users still do not have a backup solution. This reflects poorly on the entire platform reputation. So they came up with a $400 noisy, blinking box that needs its own space. These "features" are most often incompatible with female spousal units. Geeks love those gadgets, which is the market they conquered, leaving normal people behind.

WP7 - they jury is still out on that one.

Overall this looks like a bunch of products only a geek could love. Yes, they are cool, but they failed to live up to the Microsoft's then-ambitions - to change normal people's lives for the better.

pedalpete• 15 years ago

Just because you don't like/use the products is no reason to assault somebody else's work like that.

Some of these products have resulted in millions of dollars and (apparently) some happy customers.

9oliYQjP• 15 years ago

I'm a bit nostalgic but I think IE3 was huge. I was still in high school but I remember staying up all night so that I could download it the moment it was available. Up until IE3 was released, Netscape Navigator was virtually unchallenged. It was only a few months, but Netscape Navigator's big new feature was Javascript. IE3 came out with JScript support only a few months later and nullified much of Netscape Navigator's advantage there. It matched Navigator's support for plugins and HTML frames, which was important because a lot of sites were taking advantage of HTML frames at the time. If I remember correctly, it even loaded pages a lot faster than Netscape Navigator. Netmeeting and Windows Media Player also eventually came bundled with IE3 which provided a tiny glimpse of what a future web could offer, even if our paltry 14.4k and 28.8k modems couldn't deliver at the time.

Also, ActiveX gets a bad wrap but mostly because of the lack of forethought that went into security and the fact that ActiveX was Windows-only. The underlying goal being able to add functionality to the browser using a "real" programming language was just ahead of its time. For what it's worth, ActiveX was a response to Java applets which attempted a similar goal but ultimately failed because of a lack of performance (i.e., people hate Java applets because they're slow). I don't remember ActiveX suffering from the same performance issues.

sriramk2• 15 years ago

Submitted this and found out I was beaten by less than a minute :)

Charlie is an extremely famous figure at MSFT for everything from COM, Windows Home Server to WP7.

The first time I came across him was when I was in high school and I knew him as the guy behind COM (sorry, Charlie :) ) who wrote the funny foreword to Don Box's book. It is surreal to think that I actually met him and got to know him. This is a guy who knows how to build stuff. Big loss for MSFT.

CapitalistCartr• 15 years ago

" . . . to WP7."

The first time I read this, I read " . . . to Word Perfect 7." Wait, what ? ! ? Maybe I'm getting old.

flatline• 15 years ago

Most US government agencies still use Word Perfect 10 or 11, so I have the same problem with the WP acronym.

politician2• 15 years ago

This sounds like another nail in the increasingly metal-rich coffin of Silverlight, or am I reading too much into this?

solutionyogi• 15 years ago

How is this in anyway related to Silverlight?

MartinCron2• 15 years ago

SilverLight has been presented as the preferred way to develop for Windows Phone 7, much to the dismay of some SilverLight web/desktop developers who find it a good technology for web/desktop work and fear that it will be phased out.

politician2• 15 years ago

The Windows Phone 7 API is (more or less) a subset of Silverlight, and they share the same tools viz Expression Blend, XAML. From what I've read here on HN, it seems like there has been something of an exodus of key people from the Silverlight/WPF teams to other projects or companies.

That's all. Maybe I'm way off base.

ahmetalpbalkan• 15 years ago

He's just a GM. there are many GM's in WP division. It is really common to see MS GMs leaving for startups.

BarkMore• 15 years ago

Middle managers at Microsoft can be successful because of a number of skills not relevant in a startup: ability to run huge teams, Microsoft institutional knowledge, political maneuvering and so on. Some of these skills might even be harmful in a startup. It will be interesting to see how Kindel fairs outside of Microsoft.

felipemnoa• 15 years ago

>>but he says he still believes strongly in Microsoft’s long-term prospects against the likes of Apple and Google in the mobile market.

I think he looses a lot of credibility saying something like this. What does he base his belief on? Better not say anything.

sriramk2• 15 years ago

I still believe that too. Of course, when you work in a place for six years and have a lot of emotion connected to that place (see my farewell mail on my blog), it tends to bias your opinions :)

contextfree• 15 years ago

The article mentions this, but he actually left the WP team itself a while back, shortly after the initial release.

Windows Phone GM leaving Microsoft, with a rallying cry

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