If I were Elop, I'd want to hire someone I knew and felt I could trust to do the job. Elop probably knows a lot of people at Microsoft. Expecting him not to hire a Softie would be tying a hand behind his back.
And that is exactly the problem of hiring softies - they export the amazingly successful practices that resulted in blockbusters like Vista, Zune and Kin.
I'm in Seattle, and I've worked with a lot of ex-Microsoft people on various projects. I find that they are often committed to the Microsoft way of doing things, which is often appropriate for a huge software company, but wildly inappropriate for a small startup.
Unlike other big companies there is usually a Microsoft way of doing things instead of just the best way. For those coming out of Google there isn't really anything like a complete inhouse software stack that they have been exposed to like there is at Microsoft.
Yea, Techrights has several cases where ex-Microsoft people that was hired recently led the company to add a MS stack as an option. It is interesting that an issue that was discussed there years ago has become more widely discussed recently.
Your comment seems like a total non sequitur. Plus, you conveniently exclude successes like Windows XP, Windows 7, Office, SQL Server, Sharepoint, XBox, etc.
All these products, with the exception of the Xbox and SQL Server, owe their success more to marketing than to anything else.
Windows XP and Windows 7 are sold bundled with computers - you basically can't buy one without the other. The case of Vista is different - it was so awful people bought computers with Vista (counting as a Vista sale) and upgraded them to XP. Low sales indicated people put off buying new computers because it wasn't worth it - the new computer with Vista would be worse than the old one with XP. Windows 7 success was caused, in part, by those computers - they wouldn't last forever and, one day, would have to be replaced. Windows 7 was being bundled by then. And it was good enough as not to warrant upgrades to XP.
Office has no credible competition. Weren't various versions of Office using undocumented Windows APIs that their competitors couldn't and, thus, had lower performance and worst integration with the environment? I remember something in these lines. That and bundling it with Windows in corporate licenses that made others non-competitive.
And, please, Sharepoint is a joke. The only reason someone still uses it is because it's impossible to migrate its contents to any sane platform. And, of course, fear of admitting such an incompetent decision choosing it.
As for SQL Server, it's a decent platform. I have to admit it is Microsoft third best product, behind only the natural keyboard and their mice.
