Windows Chief Sinofsky Departs

Steven Sinofsky has left Microsoft. As president of the Windows division, Sinofsky led all engineering and business management for the client OS and the Windows Live consumer online services, Microsoft’s third-largest business. His sudden departure does not signal radical changes in the near term, but it could lead to a longer-term shift in release processes.

Office Discipline Brought to Windows

Sinofsky had been with Microsoft since 1989. He spent much of his career in Microsoft’s Office unit, eventually becoming president of the division as it grew from its desktop roots to incorporate major server and service lines around Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Project. The division acquired a reputation of delivering regular releases, in part by limiting bets on risky new technologies (such as the Tablet PC and the .NET Framework application platform) developed elsewhere at Microsoft.

Sinofsky took over Windows and Windows Live engineering in Mar. 2006, after the division completed the difficult five-year development cycle that produced Windows Vista. He became president of the entire division in July 2009, just before the successful launch of Vista’s successor, Windows 7. As president, he drove the development of Windows 8 and Windows RT and oversaw Microsoft’s entry into the computer hardware market with the Surface line of tablet devices. He also led development of the WinRT environment and Windows Store application development platform. The WinRT environment partially replaces the .NET Framework, which had been the primary focus of Microsoft’s developer efforts.