Group VP Maritz Retires

Group Vice President Paul Maritz, 45, has announced his retirement from Microsoft. The company says Maritz will continue to serve part time as a consultant on strategic and business issues.

In his most recent role as Group Vice President, Platform Strategy and Developer Group, Maritz was responsible for overseeing business development, product strategy and planning, and the creation of the .NET development platform. The .NET development platform includes languages, such as the recently announced C#, the Visual Studio.NET application development environment, and the Common Language Runtime (a type of virtual machine that executes applications on .NET-capable devices).

Maritz is exceptionally well respected at Microsoft, and his influence will undoubtedly be greatly missed. However, his departure is not expected to have a major impact, because he has steadily scaled back his involvement over the past 18 months.

Until the spring of 1999, Maritz had dominion over operating systems, server applications, desktop productivity applications, and developer tools—virtually all Microsoft products other than CD-ROM titles, hardware peripherals, and online services. As part of the first major reorganization following Steve Ballmer’s appointment as president in summer 1998, Maritz’s focus was narrowed to development tools and developer marketing. In fall 1999, Maritz transferred day-to-day management of Microsoft’s Developer Group to a subordinate. Maritz was on sabbatical for much of the summer of 2000.