Moving to Microsoft
Regular readers of
RDN might recognize the name Peter O'Kelly. He's a former Burton Group industry analyst who has frequently appeared in our pages, offering expert insight on a wide range of developer-oriented issues. As editors, we rely on bright and available people like Peter to pick up the phone and offer incisive commentary on the news of the day.
Well, it looks like we won't have Peter to kick around anymore. He's taken a job at Microsoft working on enterprise collaboration optimization. As Peter describes in a blog post, he'll be working with a team on communication, collaboration and information architecture for large organizations.
It's hardly unusual to watch independent developers and topic experts get snapped up by Microsoft. Jim Hugunin, John Lam, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Rob Conery, even Ray Ozzie -- the list of recently recruited Microsofties is as long as it is distinguished. And in dire economic times, it's hard to fault a guy for jumping to the company with the largest pile of cash this side of the U.S. Treasury's printing press.
And by the sounds of it, Peter in his new role will likely be engaged with one of the fastest-growing products at Microsoft: SharePoint Server. With its vast and growing install base, I'm wondering if a lot of cash-strapped businesses won't turn to SharePoint for cost-effective process, workflow and information integration.
That's a question I'll pose to Peter later this week, but I'm anxious to hear your opinion. Are you looking at SharePoint as a way to deploy cost-efficient business logic? Is your shop planning to pursue aggressive SharePoint development in the next year? E-mail me at [email protected].
Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/06/2009