Another year, another general manager for Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit. Last year, the MacBU replaced outgoing GM and lackluster keynote presenter Roz Ho with former AOL Wireless general manager Craig Eisler. But the revolving door continues to, er, revolve, and Eisler has moved on to greener pastures at MS’s Entertainment & Devices division…which, strangely enough, is where Ho ended up too. In other news: cattle mutilations are up.
Eisler’s replacement is Eric Wilfrid, a 14 year Microsoft vet who’s been with the MacBU since its humble beginnings back in 1997. Previously, Wilfrid was a Product Unit Manager overseeing MacBU engineers; he started at Microsoft working on PowerPoint in ‘94 and, after joining MacBU, worked on seven releases of Office for Mac, as well as MSN and Virtual PC. Certainly seems tough to doubt his street cred.
That seems like it might be an improvement. Eisler seemed pleasant enough, but even at his appointment we weren’t sure why he ended up there, given that his prior experience had been working at AOL and on DirectX. Given that Wilfrid’s been at MacBU since the beginning, that would seem to bode well for his experience and knowledge. We’re looking forward to it.
Poor guy! He got demoted!