Bonum Certa Men Certa

Inside-trading Microsoft President Quits the Company, Allard Does Too

Red handcuffs



Summary: Without a jail sentence -- let alone an investigation -- Robbie Bach exits Microsoft along with his sidekick from the division that cost Microsoft billions of dollars in losses

SEVERAL days ago we wrote about J Allard, who rumours suggested had left Microsoft [1, 2]. For those who do not know, J Allard is responsible for losing billions of dollars in failed projects at Microsoft. He's a key mastermind/engineer in some atrocious products like Zune. We now have it confirmed that J Allard is indeed leaving Microsoft, joining the long list of top executives who quit the company in recent years. To make matters worse, J Allard metaphorically takes with him a Microsoft President, who also seems to have decided to abandon the boat while it's rocking. We are talking about Robbie Bach, the corrupt (yet above the law) Microsoft executive with direct oversight involving money holes (or sinks) such as Xbox. What future is left for Microsoft in hardware then? Re-badged mice and keyboards from the far east?



The severity of these two new departures is so high that Steve Ballmer needed to formally announce it himself with a tone of 'damage control' [1, 2].

Microsoft Chief Experience Officer J Allard sent out a goodbye note of his own on May 25, the date that Microsoft announced officially that both Allard and Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach are leaving the company.


Over at GigaOM, a site which Microsoft used to pay for some AstroTurfing (sneakily throwing slogans into posts), there is pondering about Allard, Bach, and Ballmer. There were a lot of articles/material written back in 2008 (when Microsoft began a big decline) about the need to fire Steve Ballmer. There is nobody left who can inherit his position and besides, being the PR disaster that he is, it's probably good that he remains CEO (his predecessor spends billions investing to empower other monopolies and laundering his criminal past with legions of PR people).

“On the day of the sentencing, the gang members [Microsoft executives] maintained that they had done nothing wrong, saying that the whole case was a conspiracy by the white power structure to destroy them. I am now under no illusions that miscreants will realize that other parts of society view them that way.”

--Supreme Court Justice Jackson



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