Windows head Steven Sinofsky leaves Microsoft

Status
Not open for further replies.
Wow, this is a BIG surprise, he was in line to be the next CEO, hope it's not a health issue.
 
To bad it wasn't Ballmer the douche bag. This douche bag was responsible for the Ribbon.
 
I wonder if there's more to this than they revealed. This doesn't bode well for Windows and MSFT will surely drop tomorrow. It's possible the largely negative reaction to Win 8 had something to do with this?
 
I'm beginning to wonder if Win 8 turned out as Sinofsky wanted, or was he not happy with the final product. Seems to have been quite a lot of dissent behind the scenes and we could well be looking at product design by committee, which to be honest it sort of feels like.
 
Sinofsky was suppose to be the future of Microsoft and now he's gone? What the hell?
 
Sinofsky's views don't change what Win 8 is one way or the other. I'll keep using it and forming my own opinions, and not try to justify my beliefs because someone else may or may not agree with them. Novel concept, I know.
 
"His departure was described as a mutual decision between him and Microsoft" SOURCE

I think it's because he realizes how much a failure Windows 8 is going to be and/or doesn't think the OS should be unified with mobile OSes. He's getting out before the roof comes crashing down.

This does not bode well for Microsoft or Windows 8.
 
bigdogchris said:
"His departure was described as a mutual decision between him and Microsoft" SOURCE

I think it's because he realizes how much a failure Windows 8 is going to be and/or doesn't think the OS should be unified with mobile OSes. He's getting out before the roof comes crashing down.

This does not bode well for Microsoft or Windows 8.
Click to expand...

I guess we wait for windows 8.1
 
MrCrispy said:
I'm beginning to wonder if Win 8 turned out as Sinofsky wanted, or was he not happy with the final product. Seems to have been quite a lot of dissent behind the scenes and we could well be looking at product design by committee, which to be honest it sort of feels like.
Click to expand...

I don't think this is the case at all. Sinofsky was well known for his take charge management style and pretty much owned everything he worked on at Microsoft including Office 2007 and Windows 7, I doubt anything went info Windows 8 that he didn't signoff on and he had the full support of Ballmer and even Bill Gates from what I've read.

I don't think that this was a business but something personal, I'm sure the rumors will be hot and heavy and that eventually the truth on this will leak as the board and investors are going to want to know what happened here.
 
bigdogchris said:
I think it's because he realizes how much a failure Windows 8 is going to be and/or doesn't think the OS should be unified with mobile OSes. He's getting out before the roof comes crashing down.
Click to expand...

Ding ding ding. You hit it on the head.
 
heatlesssun said:
Just one of many rumors I'm sure to come out of this but this makes a lot of sense to me: http://www.winbeta.org/news/report-...because-he-didnt-get-steve-ballmers-job-rumor

So Ballmer may not have had as much confidence in Sinofsky as I thought, at least as leader of the whole company.
Click to expand...

I think its more likely that Sinofsky realized with Ballmer and his cohorts would never let him rise to CEO, since its obvious there was a lot of bad blood between the top execs. Sinofsky realized this, Ballmer realized he'd kept him long enough to ensure Win 8 + Surface was done on time, and made it clear what the future held for him.
 
Sounds like the same shake up Apple had a week ago. Clearing out the "trouble" it looks like.
 
I could be wrong, but I seem to recall Paul Thurrott talking about Sinofsky butting heads with some of the execs at Microsoft. I think this has little to do with Windows 8's performance, and more a personal/political thing.
 
Hmm. let's see.
- Microsoft "bet the company on Windows 8"
- Windows 8 reception has been tepid at best
- Sinofsky is out the door.

The math doesn't seem that complicated to me.
 
I'll take Paul Thurrott's guess's and hunches over the, "I don't like the UI so that's why he's gone!" theories every day of the week. Sinofsky is probably more of an ass than Balmer is, so that must be one giant ass.
 
Numan said:
I'll take Paul Thurrott's guess's and hunches over the, "I don't like the UI so that's why he's gone!" theories every day of the week. Sinofsky is probably more of an ass than Balmer is, so that must be one giant ass.
Click to expand...

This UI and the basic design of Windows 8 was done two years ago and from everything I read Sinofsky had the full support of Ballmer and Bill Gates on the design and Ballmer and Gates probably both knew that Sinofsky was the guy to deliver the product on time. But it looks like Sinofsky scorched a lot of earth doing it and his tactics probably made his becoming CEO untenable in the executive ranks of the company.

Obviously this is going to impact the future of Windows in a big way. There may be more willingness to do things like "bring back the Start Menu" but Microsoft's huge challenge is mobile and I think that Windows 8 as a hybrid has a much better shot than a standalone mobile OS and that's definitely the direction that Ballmer wanted to take otherwise I don't think he'd have let this go one for two years.
 
heatlesssun said:
This UI and the basic design of Windows 8 was done two years ago and from everything I read Sinofsky had the full support of Ballmer and Bill Gates on the design and Ballmer and Gates probably both knew that Sinofsky was the guy to deliver the product on time. But it looks like Sinofsky scorched a lot of earth doing it and his tactics probably made his becoming CEO untenable in the executive ranks of the company.

Obviously this is going to impact the future of Windows in a big way. There may be more willingness to do things like "bring back the Start Menu" but Microsoft's huge challenge is mobile and I think that Windows 8 as a hybrid has a much better shot than a standalone mobile OS and that's definitely the direction that Ballmer wanted to take otherwise I don't think he'd have let this go one for two years.
Click to expand...

It asinine for Microsoft to fuck all its corporate customers over a Consumer design. My beef with Metro has always been the lack of corp support. Since 2/3 of MS revenue is from Corporate/Business side it was a gigantic mistake. Windows 8 has some brilliant advances just not in the UI department.

Surface and 8 has been a pretty luck luster product no one is interested in it, Consumer or Corporate. Sifnosky was also responsible for the Ribbon which has its share of hatred.
I am not surprised he is been ousted.
 
Numan said:
I'll take Paul Thurrott's guess's and hunches over the, "I don't like the UI so that's why he's gone!" theories every day of the week. Sinofsky is probably more of an ass than Balmer is, so that must be one giant ass.
Click to expand...

+1!
 
Wrench00 said:
It asinine for Microsoft to fuck all its corporate customers over a Consumer design. My beef with Metro has always been the lack of corp support. Since 2/3 of MS revenue is from Corporate/Business side it was a gigantic mistake. Windows 8 has some brilliant advances just not in the UI department.

Surface and 8 has been a pretty luck luster product no one is interested in it, Consumer or Corporate. Sifnosky was also responsible for the Ribbon which has its share of hatred.
I am not surprised he is been ousted.
Click to expand...

And how many times do we have to say it? Very few businesses will upgrade to Windows 8 even if it's the best corporate release ever, unless it somehow saves them a ton of money in the long run (and this would have to be proven to them for them to even consider it).

Most businesses are in the middle of rolling out Windows 7 after waiting until Windows XP support ended and determining Windows 7 was mature enough. They aren't going to upgrade again until Windows 7 support ends and the latest Windows at the time is determined to be fully mature and stable. If there's any time to try out a new GUI without hugely impacting their business sector, now is the time.
 
Wrench00 said:
It asinine for Microsoft to fuck all its corporate customers over a Consumer design. My beef with Metro has always been the lack of corp support. Since 2/3 of MS revenue is from Corporate/Business side it was a gigantic mistake. Windows 8 has some brilliant advances just not in the UI department.
Click to expand...

The Windows 8 UI does work on both tablets and desktops, whatever the level of hate for the UI is once you actually learn to use it it's more flexible across more devices than Windows 7 and the same desktop software that runs on 7 continues to run on 8.

Wrench00 said:
Surface and 8 has been a pretty luck luster product no one is interested in it, Consumer or Corporate. Sifnosky was also responsible for the Ribbon which has its share of hatred.
I am not surprised he is been ousted.
Click to expand...

And Office is selling better than ever. So I really don't know how to view people hating something that's doing well other than some people won't like anything.
 
Tsumi said:
And how many times do we have to say it? Very few businesses will upgrade to Windows 8 even if it's the best corporate release ever, unless it somehow saves them a ton of money in the long run (and this would have to be proven to them for them to even consider it).
Click to expand...

Corporate upgrade patterns are very clear and businesses NEVER upgrade to new Windows releases out of the gate in large numbers, never ever, not even Windows 7 until recently.
 
heatlesssun said:
Corporate upgrade patterns are very clear and businesses NEVER upgrade to new Windows releases out of the gate in large numbers, never ever, not even Windows 7 until recently.
Click to expand...

We're still trying to move away from XP where I work. Most of the general office machines are on 7 (and 7 was out for a couple of years before that even happend), but a lot of the public machines and research machines are still on XP and we're just now switching them over. Of course, I've heard from someone I worked with at my last job that they've already moved to Windows 8. I think companies with a fast upgrade cycle will probably see no reason not to move to 8, while companies with a slow upgrade cycle would wait regardless of what Windows 8 is like. In otherwords, I think trying to determine Windows 8's success by looking at corporate adoption (especially this early) is a pretty useless thing to try to do.

Wrench00 said:
Sifnosky was also responsible for the Ribbon which has its share of hatred.
Click to expand...

Ohh boo-hoo. The 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' crowd got all upset because someone put out something better than what they're used to.

I wish people would get rid of this mindset that if something is different, it's automatically bad. In the capitalist world, it's adapt or die. If you can't adapt to the ribbon, you'll 'die' so to speak, because the ribbon is ultimately superior. We see the results of the ribbon all around, and none of it's bad for anybody open minded enough to try a new interaction paradigm. All the basic 'office clerk/data entry' jobs out there require potential candidates to be completely proficient in Office 2007 or later, because users using Office 2007 or later are more productive than users using Office 2003. If the ribbon were a downgrade, it wouldn't have taken such a huge hold on the industry. Maintaining the status quo for the sake of maintaining the status quo is a dinosaur mindset and it's slowly going extinct. Those who refuse to change get left behind as everybody else moves on to something better, and that's exactly what the ribbon has been like.
 
Last edited:
I've now realized the sure way to fall in love with Modern UI is to be completely ignorant of the truth.
 
The future of Windows is now very uncertain. Like what he did or not, Sinofsky at least had a vision and the ability to deliver on it. Ballmer by comparison is clueless, all he's done is make ridiculous statements with nothing to back them up and no clear direction.

I doubt we are going to see the focused dev approach we saw for Win 7/8. Win 9 will depend on the reception and adoption of Win 8.
 
MrCrispy said:
The future of Windows is now very uncertain. Like what he did or not, Sinofsky at least had a vision and the ability to deliver on it. Ballmer by comparison is clueless, all he's done is make ridiculous statements with nothing to back them up and no clear direction.

I doubt we are going to see the focused dev approach we saw for Win 7/8. Win 9 will depend on the reception and adoption of Win 8.
Click to expand...

The future of Windows was uncertain because of tablets, while personnel is important it's not nearly as important as the market. I'd say the vision of Windows is pretty clear for the next few releases overall. Improve the UI and Windows RT and work on better integration between the desktops and Modern UI.
 
heatlesssun said:
The future of Windows was uncertain because of tablets, while personnel is important it's not nearly as important as the market. I'd say the vision of Windows is pretty clear for the next few releases overall. Improve the UI and Windows RT and work on better integration between the desktops and Modern UI.
Click to expand...

I think its fair to say we wouldn't have Win 7 or 8 the way they were delivered, with a very clear focus, willingness to stick to the vision and cut what didn't fit, without Sinofsky. That is after all why he was bought on board. So in that respect people do matter. 'Better integration' can be anything, they could decide to deprecate legacy apps, make them look like Metro, make 2 different editions of Windows, there are lots of possibilities. I'm sure he had a vision for the future which was not shared by other execs.
 
MrCrispy said:
I think its fair to say we wouldn't have Win 7 or 8 the way they were delivered, with a very clear focus, willingness to stick to the vision and cut what didn't fit, without Sinofsky. That is after all why he was bought on board. So in that respect people do matter. 'Better integration' can be anything, they could decide to deprecate legacy apps, make them look like Metro, make 2 different editions of Windows, there are lots of possibilities. I'm sure he had a vision for the future which was not shared by other execs.
Click to expand...

I agree with what you're saying, I simply think that for a good while Microsoft has probably already defined it's Windows roadmap as it looks like Windows 8 was just Step One with other steps probably pretty well defined.
 
You know it makes perfect sense. Yes lets develop a multi billion piece of software and lets not try and sell to the corporate environment since its where we make 2/3 of our revenue?
Windows 8 has some great under the hood features which would be useful in the corporate environment, Branch-cache, offline domain join, Windows To Go, new GPO and powershell integration. Most of you zealots probably don't even know this because all you can do is fantasize over how great metro is.
The reason why 8 will not be adopted in the corporate environment is because of Metro. MS made it quite clear that Metro is going to take center stage. That means that Windows 9 will not get any better for corporate environments. Companies spend money on IT but they don't spend that much education neither do users. The fanboys and you know who you are have no clue because you don't deal with Corporate level enviornments of 100's and 1000's of users and computers.
Heatless, Tsumi, Devil_22 you guys are all in denial about Sifnovsky. He fucked up and now he is getting the boot.

Dogs:
I am sys admin 90% of all my desktop are 7. 95% of my clients don't update their systems every 5 years they do it when ever they have the cash to do so. If you haven't got rid of xp its your own fault. EOL is coming up and sys admins that haven't got rid of it need to get their heads and their management checked for brain damage.
As for the ribbon, I couldn't care less, doesn't bother me in the lease so don't get an idea that I give a shit about it. Its mostly users that have problems.
 
Last edited:
Wrench00 said:
Dogs:I am sys admin 90% of all my desktop are 7. 95% of my clients don't update their systems every 5 years they do it when ever they have the cash to do so. If you haven't got rid of xp its your own fault. EOL is coming up and sys admins that haven't got rid of it need to get their heads and their management checked for brain damage.
As for the ribbon, I couldn't care less, doesn't bother me in the lease so don't get an idea that I give a shit about it. Its mostly users that have problems.
Click to expand...

I JUST got Win7 here at work a week ago and along with that came Office 2010. EOL was the reason too. So basically whenever 7's EOL comes up then places like this (not a small place, probably shy of 1000 workstations) will slowly get whatever the newest is at that time which probably will be 9 on the eve of 10 coming out.

And the ribbon is a good thing! Beats having dozens of bars all over your screen!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top