Summary: As executives continue to jump the Microsoft ship, other companies absorb these executives, the latest examples being AOL, HP, Juniper, ProtonMedia, and Glam

THE departure of many Microsoft vice presidents continues at a rapid pace. The latest Vice President to jump ship is one who was mentioned in this antitrust exhibit where Bill Gates says he wants to maximise “patented stuff” (yes, Gates is among the early engineers of the software patents assault on competition and he also personally engaged in patent extortion). The Vice President in question is described as "Former Technology Assistant to Bill Gates" and he is picked up by AOL to serve as CTO (Yahoo! has the same problem).

According to sources close to the situation, AOL has hired Alex Gounares (pictured here) as its chief technology officer.

Gounare's departure was announced internally at Microsoft today, where he is corporate vice president of Advertising Research and Development and CTO for the software giant's Online Services division.

This was also covered in:

• Microsoft Advertising Exec To Leave For AOL
• Microsoft CVP “Alex Gounares” Joining AOL As CTO
• Report: Microsoft CVP Gounares will be AOL's CTO

Later on we will show that something similar has just happened at HP (top Microsoft executive appointed to serve a high position over there, and it's worth a separate long post) but before we get to that, here is another company to watch out for because of its new chief (whose departure from Microsoft and subsequent activities we covered in [1, 2]):

• Former Microsoft Deal Guy Bruce Jaffe Lands at IPO Candidate Glam
• Glam Taps Ex-MSFT Jaffe As CFO
• Getting Ready For An IPO, Glam Media Names Former Microsoft Heavyweight Bruce Jaffe CFO
• Bruce Jaffe To Join Glam Media As CFO And EVP, Corporate Development
• Former Microsoft acquisitions chief takes job with Glam Media

This convictive coverage of ours is not discriminatory by the way. It is important to remember that nobody is born a Microsoft employee; it is their own choice and it's a red flag in their career record.

In other news, a top Microsoft executive (Stephen Elop) sort of writes in Forbes about "Leaving Juniper For Microsoft" (another one here).

He joined the company in January 2008 from Juniper Networks, where he was chief operating officer. He spoke with Forbes National Editor Quentin Hardy about a key deciding factor in joining Microsoft.

Juniper has been stuffed with Microsoft executives [1, 2, 3] since Elop joined Microsoft.

Here is a new press release titled "Microsoft’s Sam Batterman Joins ProtonMedia’s Executive Advisory Board". It says:

Prior to joining Microsoft, Sam worked at Merck & Co., Inc. for eight years.

Although it's not the focus of this Web site (Merck is about patents and marketing more than about technology), Merck has "corruption" written all over it (patchily covered in [1, 2, 3, 4]), so Sam Batterman merely moved from one monovalent company into another. Again we stress: nobody is born a Microsoft employee. And as readers often remind us, when a former Microsoft employee joins another company this typically leads to assimilation and/or destruction. That's why it's so important. HR and PR are critical. ⬆