Julie Larson-Green steps down as Microsoft Office chief experience officer
For those of you who follow the inner workings at Microsoft, the news this morning will come as a shock. Julie Larson-Green, the sole senior Windows executive to survive when Steve Sinofsky exited the company, will step down from her current duties leading the Office user interface design effort.
Todd Bishop at GeekWire reports that Larson-Green is recovering from spinal surgery:
She’s expected to make a full recovery. However, based on discussions with her doctor, she decided a change was needed to focus more fully on her recovery and physical therapy.
Larson-Green started at Microsoft in 1993 as lead developer for Visual C++. She became program manager for FrontPage, then took the reins as user interface designer for Office XP. At the same time, Joe Belfiore — who’s making a public comeback this morning at the New York EDU event — was in charge of UI for Windows XP.
Larson-Green continued under Sinofsky through Office 2003 and 2007, then jumped from Office to Windows in 2006, following Sinofsky. They were tasked with pulling Windows 7 out of the fire — resulting in the most popular version of Windows to date.
Larson-Green is likely best remembered by Microsoft customers as the driving force behind the Office and Windows interfaces. She and Jensen Harris are widely credited (or blamed) for developing the first Ribbon interface, for Office 2007. She and Harris are also widely credited (or blamed) for developing the tiled Metro user interface in Windows 8.
Larson-Green recently confessed to killing Clippy, the irritating, paper-clip-shaped, animated help tool. “All he could tell you was ‘don’t run with scissors’ and ‘it looks like you’re writing a letter,'” she said.
In July 2013, Ryan Tate at Wired published an article on “the rise of Julie Larson-Green, the heir apparent at Microsoft” that openly wondered if Larson-Green would ultimately replace Steve Ballmer as CEO at Microsoft.
Following a meteoric rise as head of Windows and various stints leading hardware endeavors — even the Xbox One and Surface efforts — she returned to interface engineering in 2014. Most recently, Larson-Green has been the chief experience officer for the Office Experience Organization.
In marked contrast to the confrontational management styles all around her, Larson-Green has a reputation as an even-handed, experienced executive who’s widely respected and trusted. Microsoft could use a dozen more like her.
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