Niall Kennedy is Leaving Microsoft

That didn't take long. Niall Kennedy, who was seen as an ad hoc blogger evangelist replacement for Scoble at Microsoft, is already leaving. From his post:
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.
Looks like Microsoft may be taking the short sighted approached and be letting the Street dictate a bit too much. Microsoft, in a bit of irony if you ask me, is in the middle of what Clayton Christensen calls the Innovator's Dilemma. A disruptive technology is upon us, but the sustaining technology for Microsoft (in the form of Windows and Office) is just too much of a cash cow. They can't move away too fast, lest they loss too much of their incoming cash, but at the same time they face a very real possibility of being left behind. Add to that attempting to placate Wall Street and you have one snarky situation on your hands. Now, Microsoft has a ton of cash to help them in this, but at the rate they are going to have to spend, that cash could go away faster than one might think. Now, I'm not one of those Open Source fanatics that will claim Microsoft will be irrelevant this time next year. They'll be relevant for a long time to come. But there is a strong possibility that a major snafu now will mark the beginning of the end. Keep in mind though, the “end” won't be a company that goes out of business, but one that looks like the railroads or Xerox does today. I continue to wonder how history will look back on Ballmer.
–jeremy
Microsoft, MSFT, Niall Kennedy, Open Source, Innovators Dilemma, Windows, Xerox