Microsoft's Developer Vice President Maritz Leaves
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) said on Wednesday
that Paul Maritz, vice president of its platform strategy and developer
group and a 14-year veteran of the software giant, is retiring, the latest
high-level executive to leave the company.
Maritz, whose coordinated work on the core technologies at the heart of
the Windows operating system, had left for personal reasons but would
serve as a consultant on strategic and business issues, Microsoft said.
Yuval Neeman would continue as vice president of the developer division
while Maritz's lieutenant, Sanjay Parthasarathy, was named to a business
development and developer evangelist role reporting directly to Chief
Executive Steve Ballmer, Microsoft said.
The move is the latest in a string of high-level departures
that have hit Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft over the past year.
In May, the company saw its chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold
quit after a year-long leave of absence. That followed the departure in
January of chief financial officer Greg Maffei.
``I understand Paul's decision -- for personal reasons and after nearly 14
years at Microsoft -- to do some of the other things his life that he'd like
to do,'' Ballmer said in a statement.
Maritz's exit came less than six months after he was tapped to head the
developer group and speed the roll-out of the company's ``.NET''
initiative to rework its software for the Internet.
Joining Microsoft in 1986 after five years at Intel Corp., Maritz led the
company's early networking initiatives and later was responsible for much
work on Windows and Office, the suite of business software including
the Word word processor and Excel spreadsheet.
Maritz was an early and ardent supporter of Windows, which in its initial
versions in the 1980s was looked upon with scorn and skepticism in the
computer industry and even within the company itself.
Seeing the potential of Windows 3.1, Microsoft's first successful version
of the software released in 1990, Maritz was instrumental in convincing
his boss, company co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates, to drop a
project with IBM called OS/2 that could have usurped Windows'
popularity.
Although the move angered IBM and was risky for Microsoft, which
back then took a backseat to Big Blue, it allowed the company to devote
more resources to Windows, which eventually became the standard on
personal computers.
But Maritz was also behind one of the company's most embarrassing
moments, which centered on Netscape Communications, a company that
caught Microsoft unawares when it made the first popular software for
browsing the Internet.
In a now infamous internal e-mail, Maritz wrote that Microsoft should
include its own browser with Windows in order to ``cut off Netscape's
air supply'', a line that was a prime exhibit in the government's case that
Microsoft abused its Windows monopoly to illegally crush its rivals.
In June, a federal judge ruled that Microsoft should be broken in two to
prevent further such abuses. Microsoft has maintained it did nothing
illegal and is appealing the case.
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