Barney's Blog

Blog archive

Redmond Cover: Blessing or Curse?

We've had a lot of executives on the cover of Redmond magazine, and sometimes our timing is perfect. Turns out the cover of Redmond is either a path to riches or the kiss of corporate death. We interviewed Ray Ozzie days after he joined Microsoft, and not long thereafter Ray took over Bill Gates' job as chief software architect. Then we put VMware's Diane Greene on the cover and, despite being a fine executive, she was deposed shortly thereafter.

Our latest cover features Microsoft's Bob Muglia. Just as the issue shipped, Mr. Muglia got himself promoted to president of the Servers and Tools Division. Bob has been around Microsoft for years, and was a guy I covered 15 or so years ago at InfoWorld. In my view, he's a tough, smart and eminently reasonable business and technology leader, and so I congratulate Bob on his new role.

Who's your favorite and least favorite high-tech exec? Ballots readily received at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on January 07, 2009


Featured

  • Microsoft Dismantles RedVDS Cybercrime Marketplace Linked to $40M in Phishing Fraud

    In a coordinated action spanning the United States and the United Kingdom, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) and international law enforcement collaborators have taken down RedVDS, a subscription based cybercrime platform tied to an estimated $40 million in fraud losses in the U.S. since March 2025.

  • Sound Wave Illustration

    CrowdStrike's Acquisition of SGNL Aims to Strengthen Identity Security

    CrowdStrike signs definitive agreement to purchase SGNL, an identity security specialist, in a deal valued at about $740 million.

  • Microsoft Acquires Osmos, Automating Data Engineering inside Fabric

    In a strategic move to reduce time-consuming manual data preparation, Microsoft has acquired Seattle-based startup Osmos, specializing in agentic AI for data engineering.

  • Linux Foundation Unites Major Tech Firms to Launch Agentic AI Foundation

    The Linux Foundation today announced the creation of a new collaborative initiative — the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) — bringing together major AI and cloud players such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and other major tech companies.