The stock plummeted on the announcement Microsoft did not have its costs under control. Microsoft's market cap lost close to $59 billion in the six weeks after I joined and second quarter financials were released, more than the GDP of Ecuador and over half the market cap of Google. What do you do when the market responds to your 6 month-old online services strategy by reducing your valuation by 1.5 Yahoos? Windows Live is under some heavy change, reorganization, pullback, and general paralysis and unfortunately my ability to perform, hire, and execute was completely frozen as well.

I'm happy with what I was able to accomplish as a team of one attached to the Windows Live Alerts group. If we had the resources I truly believe we could have tackled the number of users Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces, or even Internet Explorer might supply, and then ask for more by opening up the platform to the world. I was able to borrow resources here and there, but there was no team being built around the platform in the foreseeable future. I could have stayed at Microsoft, waited for the other 85% of the company to ship their products, and then hope support for my group might be back on track again, but I didn't want to sit around doing little to nothing until Vista, Office, and Exchange ship. It's easier to get funding outside Microsoft than inside at the moment, so I am stepping out and doing my own thing.

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/08/leaving-microsoft.html

It has always seemed clear that the human brain has a number of inherent weaknesses, vulnerabilities, the neurological version of  the vulnerabilities in Microsoft's programming that allowed its operating system to be attacked by hackers.  The human brain's tendency to addiction is a big wired-in vulnerability; our apparently-neurological capacity for the suppression of empathy is another. Possibly another of these wired-in weaknesses is a sociobiological programming that makes us want to blindly follow a fixated leader, especially when that leader has a gift for inducing warm feelings, strong feelings, adrenaline spikes that may lift us up above our depression, or a sense of cozy “it's us against them“--that sweet “us against them” feeling, itself, may be neurologically wired-in. Some people, more unaware of themselves, more blind to their own impulses than others--there are degrees of self awareness, certainly, there is a spectrum of it--are more susceptible to this dominance. The dominance may be enhanced if the dominator is mentally ill, because the projection of absolute certainty of purpose, of unquestioning dogged pursuit of an aim, is important to the dominated's willingness to submit and follow; and that pathological certainty of purpose (not to be confused with a healthy goal-orientation) is characteristic of some mental illnesses.