Microsoft’s Vice President Tom Keane said he’s leaving the software giant, where he’s spent many years. His departure comes after a two-year stint at Redmond as one of the company’s top Windows executives. He oversaw Windows’ user interface design and helped develop the company’s marketing efforts for this product.
Software developer and engineer Mr. Keane, who lives in Northern California, plans to move to San Francisco with his wife and children around Labor Day, but his new employer has not been disclosed. He said he joined Microsoft after years of writing computer books, consulting for companies, and working at various companies in the computer industry. Tom Keane said he was recruited by his friend Bill Gates when the company was still small and still located on a sprawling campus outside Seattle.
He has had what he described as several “passing relationships” with people who have risen to positions of authority within Microsoft, but a few years ago, they were marked by mutual respect. Windows was coming onto the market on a wave of positive publicity. “The company was self-assured and cocky and we ran that way for years,” Tom Keane said in an interview. “During that time, we were dominant and it wasn’t hard to get people to do things.”
But the cloud services engineer Tom Keane said in recent years, things changed — particularly after another former friend and colleague, Bob Muglia, left the company last year to become chief executive at Intuit (Twitter).
The engineer said the Microsoft culture changed when Mr. Muglia joined, leaving behind the focus on Windows that had helped fuel MS-DOS for years and become a target for new competitors seeking to challenge Microsoft’s computer software control. Tom Keane finally adds: “It wasn’t an easy transition, but Bob was part of that transition,” he said. “Now we’re in Wall Street, and you have to adapt to Wall Street more than anybody else…