Terry (Premium)

I want to address today's news about Terry Myerson in a way that is unique, personal, and respectful. So I'm going to tell you a few stories.

The first regard Terry's two most recent predecessors.

In late May 2011, I headed down to the southern end of Manhattan to attend the launch of Windows Phone 7.5. And I witnessed something I'd never seen before. As Andy Lees discussed whatever advances were coming in this new generation of phone software, it suddenly dawned on me that this guy had no idea what he was talking about. He didn't know the product, certainly not at the level of detail one should expect.

Lees didn't last too much longer in this position, and his replacement, Terry Myerson, was someone I had never heard of. But it seemed like anyone would be an improvement. And the subsequent release of Windows Phone, version 8, was perhaps not coincidentally the first truly excellent version of the software, and a major rearchitecture.

I now measure every Microsoftie on what I think of as the "Lees" scale. This scale goes from One Lees to One Elop. And Myerson is far more Elop than Lees: He knows what he's talking about.

Concurrent to all that, a madman named Steven Sinofsky had taken over Windows, stolen the best ideas from Windows Phone, and then created Windows 8 and, worse, Windows RT. The result was the worst disaster in the history of Windows and Microsoft ousted Sinofsky---who had been plotting to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO---ahead of the product's launch. Imagine having to launch Windows 8 knowing that it was a train wreck. That's what Microsoft faced in 2012.

Myerson wasn't immediately chosen to lead Windows. There was a brief and weird period in which two unqualified Sinofsky underlings were for some reason given responsibility for this product. But after a series of purges, the Sinofsky era finally ended for real, and Myerson was tasked with fixing the Windows 8 disaster.

The irony here is thick, though many outside of Microsoft are probably unaware of why. When Sinofsky took over Windows in the wake of Windows Vista, he got rid of most of the key people from the previous regime, and many of them ended up on Windows Phone. So the reason Sinofsky stole from Windows Phone and then stopped collaborating with that team is that he considered them the B team. And the B team wasn't going to impact "big" Windows. They were just the quickest way to get moving on mobile. And then they could be dropped.

With Myerson leading big Windows, however, the B-teamers got their revenge. Now they would chart the course forward. Would fix all the terrible problems that Sinofsky created. Would make Windows great again.

Given this history, I was quite happy about Myerson's new role at Microsoft. And the initial vision for Windows 10, which Myerson and Joe Belfiore unveiled in late 2014 confirmed my hopes. Everything was going to be fine.

The intervening years saw some ups and downs. Microsoft, of course, purchased the onl...

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