Bob Muglia, President of the Servers and Tools business has been announced as stepping down – euphemism for being Robbie Bach-ed at Microsoft. Bob was reponsible for bringing all the disparate developer tools together at Microsoft back in the mid 1990s with Visual Studio – still one of the best development platforms in the IT business. Bob also took on the responsibility for tuning up the mixed metaphor that was Exchange Server in early 2000s. Lately he has been responsible for the cloud server Azure which is site of the promising Web Matrix development tools.
Advice to start-ups or software vendors looking for savvy manager – grab this guy as soon as he becomes available on the market. Bob takes on the thankless tasks, gets teams working well together and produces great software.