Key Microsoft exec leaves the company

Posted Jun 21st 2006 11:36AM by Brian White
Filed under: Bad News, Management, Insiders, Consumer Experience, Internet, Microsoft (MSFT)

Martin Taylor, a name not known to many outside the tech industry -- but a hugely-important Microsoft employee -- is leaving ole' Softie. Taylor was recently charged with developing and deploying key pieces of a strategy to compete with the product and service onslaught from rival Google, and strangely left abruptly just this week without a prior announcement from Redmond.

With Taylor being quite a high-up figure in the Microsoft oligarchy, and being a personal adviser to CEO Steve Ballmer, it sends weird vibes through the markets when an abrupt departure happens like this. With Taylor in charge of marketing for Windows Live and MSN -- Microsoft's two internet properties that are highly-touted as Microsoft's answer to Google, this even casts a weirder shadow on the resigning of Mr. Taylor.

Windows Live -- still in beta here -- is the portal that is supposed to give a global visibility (any browser from any computer) to Microsoft as more computing needs move from the local PC to the web. Yet, Microsoft seems to be developing live.com for a Internet Explorer-only audience, as I still cannot access the site in its entirety from Mozilla Firefox 1.5. Sigh -- Microsoft, please wake up here -- not everyone uses your browser! After using the newer Internet Explorer 7 recently, I still find Firefox to be the preferred web browser -- and so do millions of web surfers worldwide.

[Disclosure: I own MSFT shares as of 6-21-06]

Tags: Microsoft, MSFT

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

6-22-2006 @ 12:13PM

Thogek said...

Very interesting about Martin Taylor. We always have to wonder what's going on over there, and how changes there will trickle out to the rest of the industry.

On a side-note, you said:
"After using the newer Internet Explorer 7 recently, I still find Firefox to be the preferred web browser..."

Internet Explorer 7 has not been officially released; it's still in beta. So comparing it head-to-head to an already released and in-use rival browser would seem a tad bit nonsensicle. At least point out what's wrong or still lacking with the IE7 beta, and understand that some issues may still get fixed or improved before it actually releases.

After it releases, feel free to point out how much it still lags behind your favorite other-browser. But until then, please don't feed the flames of misinformation; they're bad enough already.

Not that Microsoft is helping with the way they're marketing of beta releases, lately, as though they were actual RTM releases. (E.g., see the IE7 re-branding of MS's IE pages at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/.) So maybe MS deserves the head-to-head comparisons, if they're gonna market their betas that way. But it just ends up being that much more scrambled disinformation for the Web-browsing consumer who unsuspectingly installs beta software on his production machines...

BTW, lots of good related discussion on this at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/20/640011.aspx and other places...