In Defense of Chris Capossela (Premium)

After marketing itself as the kinder, gentler Big Tech corporation under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has stumbled in recent months, and badly.

And I'm always here to be critical when the situation demands it, just as I'm always here to point out when Microsoft or its executives get something right. The problem is that the problems I've complained about in recent years have been localized to the increasingly less important parts of the company that I care about, like Windows. But Microsoft has been making major PR gaffs and strategy mistakes left and right this past year. It's like a sports game where everything keeps going wrong for one team.

Activision Blizzard and other antitrust concerns around Teams and Azure have led onlookers to wonder if we're not experiencing the return of the "Bad old Microsoft" from the 1990s. The software giant is releasing AI at scale before it is ready only to have the CEO of the company they licensed it from, OpenAI, testify to the U.S. Congress that the technology is dangerous and needs to be regulated. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella flew back and forth to Davos on a private plane just before announcing massive layoffs of tens of thousands of employees. And then he just revealed to those employees who are left that no one was getting a raise this year. What is this, a season of Succession?

It keeps happening.

This week, Fortune got its dirty little mitts on an internal memo penned by Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela in which he explains to employees that their best strategy for pay raises in the wake of this year's pay freeze is to do something that positively impacts Microsoft's stock price.

"Great quarterly results contribute to making the stock attractive which in turn drives everyone’s total compensation up,” he writes in the memo. “We are still investing heavily in our people as well as in our data center capacity to hopefully position us well for the Al transformation.”

That may seem insensitive at first blush, but Fortune stacked the deck against him further by starting the story off by mentioning that Capossela "just cashed out $4.4 million worth of stock," drawing an image of the haves once again feasting while the have-nots suffer. It's vaguely reminiscent of the Nadella private plane story.

Except that it's unfair.

Capossela isn't the CEO of Microsoft, and he has nothing to do with corporate compensation decisions. And his decision to sell stock may be a bad look, but it's part of his assets and it's his to sell. And he presumably won't be getting a raise this year either, along with the rest of Microsoft's employees.

What Capossela is, is the CMO, the chief marketing officer, and his spin on the situation is nothing less than consistent with the clear-headed discussions he's had with Mary Jo Foley and me on what used to be our annual Windows Weekly holiday special. Chris, as I think of him, has never been anything other than honest and forthright. And his response to emp...