Windows News Digest [#3]

As usual we offer you our Windows Digest with the most important news about windows & windows processes.

Windows marketing chief Brad Brooks announced his departure from Microsoft earlier this week, making him the latest in a string of executives to leave the company in recent months. In a phone interview, Brooks said he was leaving for Juniper Networks because the move to cloud computing provides a huge opportunity for network vendors. As companies move to a world where applications are delivered over the Internet or a private network, there’s a lot of room to sell products that manage access to those networks and ease data transfer across them. Brooks also said he knew a lot of people at Juniper — presumably including former Windows President Kevin Johnson, who left Microsoft in 2008 to become Juniper’s CEO — and because he wanted to move back to California where he grew up.

Bob Muglia, head of servers and tools, is leaving Microsoft this summer. In a memo to employees, Steve Ballmer says he’s conducting a search internally and externally for a replacement. He also says, “I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB,” which makes it seem like he’s tossing Muglia. Muglia is the third division head to leave in the past year. Stephen Elop, who ran the Office division, left for Nokia. Robbie Bach who was in charge of mobile and gaming also left.

Earlier this week at a meeting with President Obama and President Hu, Microsoft President Ballmer pressed Chinese President Hu Jintao on Wednesday to step up enforcement of intellectual property rights in China. While acknowledging that China’s decade of efforts to crack down on software piracy has failed in the eyes of foreign businesses, President Hu recognizes the problem. Steve Ballmer, along with other business leaders pointed out that their estimate is that only one customer in every 10 of their products is actually paying for it in China. According to President Obama indicated that Hu had agreed to take action.

Last year only a couple of weeks after Kinect hit the market, a bunch of dubious hackers managed to crack the hardware and get it running on a Windows 7 machine. While the function it performed was fairly basic, it opened the flood gates for the rest of the hackers and developers since they had the necessary drivers. Initially it didn’t look like Microsoft condoned this practice and didn’t seem to happy about it. But then at CES, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that the company would announce official PC support for Kinect “in the right time”