Microsoft's General Manager of the Windows Phone Developer Experience on Monday announced that he is leaving Microsoft to launch a start up. Kindel did not share the details of his new endeavor, and his public profile on networking site LinkedIn lists him as Founder and CTO of at A super secret stealth startup. "[The start up] has to do with sports, advertising, mobile, social-networking, and, of course, the cloud," Kindel wrote in a post on his personal blog. "I'm insanely excited to get started." The soon-to-be former executive was with Microsoft for 21 years, having joined the Redmond-based company's developer support group in 1990. Kindel's full email to his team regarding the decision follows below.
From: Charlie KindelSent: Monday, August 08, 2011 9:00 AMTo: A gazillion old friends and colleaguesSubject: Goodbye Microsoft – After 21 Years It's Time To Move OnJuly 2, 1990 was my first day at Microsoft and September 2, 2011 will be my last.In the time honored tradition of "good-bye mails" this is mine.My first Microsoft product was a Z-80 Softcard for my Apple ][+ in 1984. That amazing product enabled me to become a UCSD P-System, CP/M, and Turbo Pascal geek. I still remember opening the big clear plastic box for the first time.In 1988 (my junior year at the University of Arizona) I decided I wanted to work for Microsoft when I discovered Windows programming (I conned my dad into buying me a copy of the Windows 2 SDK). Charles Petzold was my hero.I got no-hired after my first interviews (a dev role in Languages; shouldn't really surprise anyone).I bribed my recruiter into getting me another set of interviews by sending her a Christmas card (clearly I was meant to be a PM).The brightest memory I have of my first day at work was a Seattle Times sports page pinned to my manager's (Ridge Ostling) cube: "Husky Women Beat Beavers".A few months later we threatened to quit because management kept turning the lights ON in Lincoln Plaza.Arne Josefsberg: I feel bad about writing that tool that generated fake time tracking reports. But what did you expect? We were providing the best damn developer support possible and the number of minutes we spent doing it was totally irrelevant.Curtis Palmer: I miss you. Our Bogus Software was the best. RIP.Tunneling Todd Laney, one day I got so pissed that the Windows 8514a driver didn't support "smallfonts" that I just fixed it and checked it in. I was still in PSS. My first "production code" at Microsoft and if you don't count OLEView which was just a tool, my last.I decided I wanted to be Chris Guzak. So I got out of PSS and into Developer Relations. I know, it doesn't make sense to me either.Vertical Developer Relations was an amazing group. Out of that group came: Jeff Teper, Satya Nadella, Joe Long, John Wilcox, Bret O'Rourke, and others.After writing OLEView I woke up and I was no longer an evangelist but a PM on the OLE team. Initially I was given all the glamorous stuff like Mac OLE. Mario Goertzel scared the crap out of me. It was 3 months before he and the other devs would invite me to lunch.I got to work with Bob Atkinson. He taught me the trick of taking people on walks during 1:1s. He also taught me everything I know.We gave all PDC '93 attendees a CD with the first DCOM bits. ole.h was missing. One (one!) customer noticed. We thought DCOM was hot-sh**. It wasn't.The first name for COM+ was COM3. Windows used to let you create directories named COM3. But you couldn't delete them. The real reason I'm leaving Microsoft? COM is making a comeback.Sweeper and December 7, 1995 were epic. How the name "ActiveX" was chosen was not. Designing the
