Microsoft has appointed Michael Sievert to its Windows product management team.
Michael Sievert was yesterday named by Microsoft as corporate vice president for Windows product management, placing him in charge of marketing, product planning and management for Windows client software products. As such, Mr Sievert is now in charge of the Longhorn client.
Senior vice president for the Windows client business Will Poole said in a statement that Mr Sievert would help communicate the value of technology and services to a broad customer base.
Mike brings to the Windows product management team broad industry experience and deep insight into driving marketing excellence, Mr Poole said.
Mr Sievert is an industry veteran with more than 15 years’ experience, who most recently served with AT&T Wireless Services as executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Mr Sievert was responsible for product management of the company’s core $15 billion business and held fiscal accountability for several product lines, Microsoft said.
However, Mr Sievert has his work cut out at Microsoft in stewarding a successfully architected, must-have operating system to market. Microsoft has been forced to juggle delivery with feature sets and work on security around Longhorn during the last year, a fact that has impacted both the delivery date and architecture. A new storage subsystem and web services communications layer, WinFS and Indigo, were ripped out last year and re-assigned to other operating system and server products.
It is now clear the Longhorn client will focus on more traditional operating system features, such as scalability and security that are worthy, if rather dull, concepts to attempt to sell to businesses and consumers.
Additionally, Microsoft must infuse related desktop product groups with a belief in the potential and opportunity for Longhorn. After a year of substantial change to the proposed architecture, groups working on the Longhorn wave of products need to know what to expect from Longhorn and how to exploit the underlying operating system’s features in their own planned software.
