There was some distressing news buried in Sean Michael Kerner's look into Novell's and Microsoft's virtualization partnership. The news, however, had nothing to do with virtualization, and everything to do with Microsoft job titles.
This was a product announcement, yet Microsoft resorted to its legal department for quotations??? (Novell, of course, offered up a "senior product marketing manager." It has yet to become a licensing company, and is still focused on thriving as a software company.)
The two Microsoft employees quoted have bizarro job titles:
- Monty O'Kelley, technical director of legal and corporate affairs at Microsoft
- Brent Phillips, senior product manager for intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft
Every big company has a healthy-sized legal department. Microsoft? Well, if it's passing out job titles like this, I'm guessing it has run out of titles like "product marketing manager" and "developer" and is instead doing weird mash-ups between its engineering teams and legal.
When you have someone whose job it is to come up with "intellectual property and licensing products," you've lost your way. Most software companies focus on selling (gasp!) software. Not, apparently, Microsoft.
Discuss: A sign that Microsoft is becoming the world's biggest law firm
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