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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as likely; as noted, announcing a departure along with a search for a replacement is telling.

Was the Surface RT the trigger? Well, one does wonder how many billion dollar write offs can occur under a CEO's watch before the board says enough. E.g. the KIN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_KIN), even if that wasn't to my knowledge formally written off.

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I had completely forgotten about the KIN. In all reality, I was hoping that the Surface would compete and bring Microsoft back in the competition (I hate Microsoft, but I'd hate to see them die off I'm also not a fan of Apple... but that's, I guess another story).

I thought the Courier was a great idea not just for the dual screens but the software as well the scraps and notes seemed like a great idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI

It was!

There's also lots of gloriously amazing tech that the Microsoft Research division produces. However, from what I can see, for whatever reason, much of it doesn't see the daylight.

Much research does't see daylight in general. That is the nature of research. Some does make into products, but you'd be hard pressed to trace its path from research to product from the outside.

Politics, from what I've heard. Projects like the KIN where killed off my VPs who were afraid it would compete with their products, like Windows Mobile.

For example, they had to pay a terrible platform tax in making it work with Exchange using buggy supplied code. Given the young consumer market they were targeting, that was stark raving mad.

As I remember the KIN was also screwed at the last moment when Verizon decided to abandon it. Not only did they not push it like they had planned, they decided it would count as a smartphone, thus your teenager's new "feature phone+" would cost you $50-$70 a month instead of the $10 or $20 it should have.

That put directly in the iPhone price range, and the KIN was never designed to compete with the iPhone or any other real smartphone.

Too bad. I heard the sync software for it was actually pretty fantastic.

As I recall Verizon didn't do that out of spite, they did it for a variety of reasons that were pretty much Microsoft related, like it being late and lacking some necessary features. I suspect the ways in which Microsoft screwed over or tried to screw over T-Mobile didn't help,

I'm wondering if the reorganization was Ballmer's idea or if the board was behind that. My impression when the reorganization came out was that Ballmer was feeling pressure and the reorganization was an attempt to save his job.

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