On his Twitter account this morning, Steven Sinofsky announced his first stop after his resignation as President of the Windows Division at Microsoft: he’s going back to Harvard (where he taught a couple of classes in the late 90’s) to teach “product development” at Harvard Business School:
Excited to return to @harvardhbs to teach again this spring!New perspectives, recharge, share experiences, write.#sabbatical
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) December 19, 2012
Sinofsky left Microsoft immediately after the launch of Windows 8, with some saying he was pushed out by CEO Steve Ballmer after disagreements on how to collaborate across the company. According to GeekWire, Sinofsky published an internal blog post shortly before his departure that laid out his vision of “collaboration”, which apparently didn’t jibe with Ballmer’s, although we’ve yet to hear the real story as to what happened.
While we have no information on the terms of Sinofsky’s departure, a one year (at least) non-compete clause would be almost standard, meaning he wouldn’t be able to take another job in the tech industry for quite some time, so this “sabbatical” makes sense.
Who knows, maybe we’ll learn more from Sinofsky’s teachings this spring, and we’re hoping that the class or classes will be available as webinars from Harvard.
Anyway, we wish Mr. Sinofsky and Harvard good luck, we’re sure the class or classes will be interesting and informative!