Scott Guthrie moves on to lead the Azure Application Platform team

imageWhat could be important enough to interrupt the flow of posts on practical project experience? It is the reorganization that will throw every .NET developer’s favorite übergeek to a new position.

Yes, Scott Guthrie is leaving his post as the head honcho for many things such as IIS, ASP.NET, Silverlight and a slew of other products. His new task? Make sure the developers love Azure and get a solid development story on Microsoft’s cloud platform.

What does this mean?

  • ScottGu’s blog will probably focus more on things related to cloud development (including private cloud). The division he’ll be working in delivers database services, BizTalk, AppFabric, WCF and workflows.
  • There will have to be new champions for his previous products. Perhaps not directly in the terms of organizational position, but in the terms of being the public face for said products. Scott Hanselman and others will probably come to the rescue web-wise.
  • Somebody else will probably keynote MIX12. Then again, PDC11 will probably see even a more empowered ScottGu preaching the Azure religion.

One thing I’m a bit worried about is the openness development that has been set well into pace in Guthrie’s previous organization. Co-operation with the jQuery team, integration of new open source technologies into the Visual Studio / .NET mix, growing support for releasing previously closed source, very open and straightforward relation to the developer scene… All this has been highly valuable.

I’m sure the Gu will take much of the goodness to his new org, but I’m less certain if the goodness will remain in the old one. At the same time, all this makes sense: ASP.NET and Silverlight are very, very mature compared to the development story on Azure. It’ll be interesting to see his impact over the coming months. Also, given the somewhat inherently closed nature of the cloud, the next steps of the openness story are worth looking forward to.

May 3, 2011 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET, Cloud

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