09.04.09
Google — Like Mozilla — Sheds Off Some Microsoft Impact
Summary: Lee Kai-Fu from Google leaves the company, just like Mark Lucovsky (both of whom came from Microsoft’s management)
Last year we wrote about how Mozilla lost the influence of Microsoft and this morning we wrote about how Telstra has gained Microsoft influence. It is a fact of life that people move between places, but not every company engages in what it calls "Jihad" and uses what it calls the "insider friend, 'the Fox'."
It has been abundantly clear for a while — also based on input from our informants — that Google was partly influenced by Microsoft employees whom it hired*. There are (or were) some very major ones among them. The good news is that one of them is now leaving.
Lee Kai-Fu, who joined from Microsoft in 2004, will step down as president of Google in greater China in September, the company said.
When he joined, Microsoft sued Google and Mr Lee, claiming he had violated an agreement that prohibited him from working for a rival for one year.
Mark Lucovsky, the man who led Steve Ballmer to throwing a chair when he abandoned Microsoft for Google, has also left Google, but he is now with the same group of former Microsoft employees that manage VMware (at least 4 of them). They messed up the company, but it’s good for their former employer. VMware is no longer serious enough about Linux. █
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* Microsoft software/API like DirectX and ActiveX was sometimes chosen, which left GNU/Linux users in the dark. A lot of software was also Windows-only.
Yuhong Bao said,
September 5, 2009 at 11:50 am
“Microsoft software/API like DirectX and ActiveX was sometimes chosen, which left GNU/Linux users in the dark. A lot of software was also Windows-only.”
Yep, even Sergey Brin got frustrated at the Windows-only nature of the first version of Chrome, calling it “embarrassing”:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5044780/google-founder-on-no-chrome-for-macs-its-embarrassing