Can the Windows Live Team Reverse the Microsoft Brain Drain?

While Microsoft has done little to tout the fact, the Windows Live team is scooping up big-name developers with Google, Amazon, AOL, BEA, and Technorati pedigrees.

Another day, another Microsoft defector.

At least that's the public perception. Over the past couple of years, Microsoft brain drain has been a hot topic, with Microsoft developers and executives jumping ship for Amazon.com, Google, Technorati and a variety of other Web 2.0 players and startups.

However, despite the dearth of headlines, Microsoft has been doing its own share of poaching, too. And many of Microsoft's new big-name hires, such as Steve Berkowitz, the former Ask.com CEO who just joined Microsoft to head up the online business unit, are choosing to join Microsoft's MSN and Windows Live teams.

The MSN/Windows Live teams are leading the charge to rebrand and refurbish many of Microsoft's existing Internet services, including Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail), Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), and Windows Live Search (formerly MSN Search). They are building a number of brand-new Windows Live services, designed to take on similar competitive offerings from Google, Yahoo, AOL and other established services players. And they are working on making Windows Live a development platform designed to attract third-party coders to build on top of Microsoft's Live programming interfaces and services.

"The Live teams definitely seem to be more like Google/Yahoo/Amazon.com, et al., than traditional Microsoft product teams in terms of hiring and other modus operandi," said Peter O'Kelly, an analyst with The Burton Group. "I suspect that's partly because of their domain – with very different opportunities and constraints relative to traditional software product development, thanks to the Web-centric model, for example -- and partly because of the strategic imperative for Microsoft to rapidly gain momentum relative to exceptionally aggressive competitors such as Google."

To deliver on its ambitious charter, the Live team needs some serious fire power. And, increasingly, it has been finding it outside the company.

In a recent blog entry, Ken Levy, a product planner on the Windows Live – who recently joined the team from Microsoft's developer division -- described the Live team as being like a "Monsters of Rock" concert line up.

Among some of Microsoft's latest Windows Live hires:

Danny Thorpe - Thorpe was the former Chief Scientist at Borland, who left Borland in October 2005 and then went to work at Google. On April 10, Thorpe joined Microsoft as a Windows Live senior program manager architect.

Niall Kennedy – In mid-April, Kennedy joined Microsoft's Windows Live division from Technorati to create a new Microsoft product team around syndication technologies such as RSS and Atom. From February 2005 to February 2006, Kennedy was community manager at Technorati, where he was a visible proponent of blogging.

J.J. Allaire -- Allaire became part of the Windows Live team when Microsoft bought his Internet information research company, Onfolio, in early March. Onfolio's technology is being incorporated into the Windows Live Toolbar. Allaire is the architect of the ColdFusion application server and co-founder of Allaire Corp., which was sold to Macromedia in 2001.

David LaVallee – LaVallee joined the Windows Live Messenger team in November 2005. LaVallee was one of the members of the "Green" project at Sun Microsystems, which spawned the "Oak" project that turned into Java. According to Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble, LaVallee also worked at Apple and "was the guy who pushed jobs to buy Garageband," and did a stint at Disney.

Ronny Kohavi - Kohavi joined Windows Live in 2005 from Amazon.com, where he was director of data mining and personalization. Prior to Amazon, Kohavi worked at Blue Martini Software, where he served most recently as vice president of business intelligence. Kohavi joined Microsoft as a general manager charged with building the Windows Live "Experimentation Platform," which is a hosted environment for new product/feature development.

Bill Zissimopoulos – Zissimopoulos, according to Levy, was recently part of the Visual Studio team at Microsoft. Previously Zissimopoulos was an architect at AOL who responsible for the design and implementation of parts of AOL's trusted security and transactional infrastructures for their datacenters. Levy said Zissimopoulos now is a lead developer working on core Windows Live developer platform efforts. Microsoft did not respond by the time this article was published to a request for a Windows Live hire date for Zissimopoulos.

Yaron Goland: Goland recently joined Microsoft from BEA to work on Windows Live. At BEA he was the director of technology and is considered an expert in REST, XML, and message-passing systems. From 1996 to 2000, Goland was a Microsoft program manager, focusing on Windows' Plug & Play and WebDAV efforts. From 2000 to 2001, he worked at Crossgain, the Web-services and tools company founded by former Microsoft manager Adam Bosworth. (Crossgain was later acquired by BEA.) Microsoft did not respond by the time this article was published to a request for a Windows Live hire date for Goland.

As Microsoft insiders and company watchers continue to wrestle with ideas for fixing morale, recruitment and stock-price challenges facing the software giant, they may want to consider bottling a bit of Windows Live's "secret sauce."

Additional reporting by eWEEK's Darryl K. Taft.

This article was originally published on microsoft-watch.com.

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