From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 9:16 PM
To: MS Corporate Employees: FTE Only; MS Intl Employees: FTE Only; MS Domestic Employees: FTE Only; WebTV Wnifolk
Subject: Distinguished Engineers
Our success as a company and our continued leadership in the software industry is based in large part on the intellectual contributions of our employees. Their strategic and innovative insight has laid the technical foundation that enables us to create and deliver a continuing stream of dynamic products and services for our customers. M?crosöft is fortunate to have a number of key people on our team whose technical vision, expertise and world-class leadership have been instrumental in developing and driving products and standards for both the company and the industry. The contributions of these visionaries are unparalleled and essential to our long-term success.
To recognize their extraordinary contributions, we are honoring 16 employees with the special designation of Distinguished Engineer (DE). This honor is an acknowledgement of their technical brilliance and vision, and of the key role they play in shaping the standards and practices of our industry. Their expertise will be of primary importance as we create and deliver the next generation of world-class software and services. Please join me in congratulating our new Distinguished Engineers.
Dave Cutler, Platforms Group/Windows Base Team. Dave joined M?crosöft in 1988. He started the Windows NT group and has since driven the development of three major releases of that product, now known as Windows 2000. Considered one of the top practicing programmers worldwide, Dave was awarded membership of the National Academy of Engineering in 1993 in recognition of his major contributions to the field.
Mark Lucovsky, Platforms Group/Windows Base Team. Mark joined M?crosöft in 1988, and is a founding member of the Windows NT team. He is currently senior architect for Windows 2000, responsible for the overall technical integrity and direction of the core operating system. Before joining M?crosöft, Mark worked at Digital Equipment Corp. and at Culler, where he worked on the Unix kernel for mini-supercomputers.
Wael Bahaa-El-Din, Windows Performance. Since joining M?crosöft in 1994, Wael has built and managed the world-class Windows performance-analysis group. Wael’s leadership has been instrumental in winning numerous awards for Windows products, and benchmarks for best-in-class networking and server performance. Before joining M?crosöft, Wael was at Digital Equipment Corp., where he was awarded the Technical Leadership and Excellence Achievement award for his leadership in the industry.
Anders Hejlsberg, Developer Division. Since joining M?crosöft in 1996, Anders has played a pivotal role in the development and design of Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes. He currently works on COM+ and Visual Studio 7. Before joining M?crosöft, Anders was a principal engineer at Borland International, where he was the original author of Turbo Pascal and chief architect of the Delphi product line.
Antoine Leblond, Office Development Group. Antoine joined M?crosöft in 1989 and is currently director of Office development. In this role he oversees the technical design and development strategy of M?crosöft Office, and coordinates the application and shared technology development teams. Previously, he led the development efforts of M?crosöft Word 97 and 2000.
Suryanarayanan Raman, Business Productivity Group. Suryanarayanan joined M?crosöft in 1988 as a software design engineer. Since then he has worked as a group manager in a number of divisions, including the Desktop Applications Division, and currently focuses on Internet and advanced technological architecture. Suryanarayanan is highly regarded for his vision and his overall contributions to the field of Internet technologies and advanced architecture.
Charles Thacker, eMerging Technologies. Charles joined M?crosöft in 1997 as director of advanced systems, with the goal of helping set up the MSR lab in Cambridge, England. He worked on everything from recruiting to defining the research agenda and establishing the lab’s operating procedures. Previously, Charles was chief designer of Xerox PARC’s Alto, the first personal computer to use a bit-mapped display and a mouse as part of its user interface, and the co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network. Charles is a distinguished alumnus of the Computer Science Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and was granted an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Butler Lampson, eMerging Technologies. Butler joined M?crosöft in 1995. He is an architect in eMerging Technologies in the Business Productivity Group, and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in the industry has ranged from local area networks and printers to programming in large, fault-tolerant computing. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal computer, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, and several programming languages. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and an honorary doctorate from the Eidgenoessische Techniche Hochschule, in Zurich, Switzerland.
Jim Gray, M?crosöft Research. Jim specializes in database and transaction processing systems. Since joining M?crosöft his research has focused on building megaservers from commodity software and hardware, otherwise known as scaleable computing. Jim holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley sits on a number of government bodies, is widely published, and has been honored throughout the industry with a number of accolades, including the ACM Turing award.
Darryl Rubin, Development Management Group. Darryl joined M?crosöft in 1986 and is vice president of software strategy and an architect in the developer management group. He has been instrumental in developing M?crosöft’s vision of Information At Your Fingertips. Since joining M?crosöft, he has played a key role in shaping the company’s Internet strategy and object and distributed networking architectures. Darryl is widely published, and holds a B.S. in biology from Stanford University.
Brad Lovering, Developer Group/Visual Basic. Since joining M?crosöft in 1988, Brad has worked as a developer, development lead and architect on a long line of M?crosöft developer products. He currently leads the architecture team for Visual Studio 7. He originally came to M?crosöft as an intern, working on M?crosöft language and tools comprehension. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Washington.
Lou Perazzoli, Platforms Group/Windows Base Team. Lou joined M?crosöft in 1988 and is one of the original architects of Windows NT. He was responsible for the design and implementation of the virtual memory manager, the design of the object manager, and was a key contributor to the design of the file cache, the I/O subsystem and driver model. He holds two bachelors degrees, one in mathematics, the other in computer science, both from Virginia Tech.
Michael Toutonghi, Consumer Strategy
Michael helped conceive, architect, and manage the Common Language Runtime, M?crosöft's high performance, multi-language runtime core for the .NET initiative. As the project grew in scope, he helped organize, integrate and, until early this year, serve as General Manager for the broader .NET framework effort. During his 7-1/2 year tenure at M?crosöft, Michael has also served as Development Manager for one of the core technologies in IE and Development Lead for Windows 95 Kernel. Before coming to M?crosöft, he created OmniView, a multitasking environment for MS-DOS, Turbo Professional, a developers’ library for Turbo Pascal, and a variety of other systems and applications level products. Michael recently started a new project intended to simplify and enhance the consumer experience for audio/video, communications, and home security.
Peter Spiro, Platforms Product Group/SQL Server. Peter joined M?crosöft in 1994 and currently manages the database engine team for SQL Server, which includes the Windows CE version of SQL Server. He was also the principal architect of the storage engine for SQL Server 7.0. Peter holds four patents related to database journaling and recovery, and has worked in all areas of database storage technology. He has two masters’ degrees - in forestry and computer science - from the University of Wisconsin.
Mohsen Al-Ghosein, Business Applications Division. Mohsen joined M?crosöft in 1990 and currently manages the business operations group in the small business division. Mohsen played a number of roles in the early years of M?crosöft Consulting Services (MCS), and was the product unit manager for M?crosöft Transaction Server. Mohsen has also been involved in a number of corporate strategy and architectural roles including COM+. Most recently, Mohsen has been focused on Internet application service hosting strategies.
Charles Simonyi, Business Applications Division. Charles came to M?crosöft to start the development of microcomputer applications in 1981. He hired and managed the teams who developed M?crosöft Multiplan, Word and Excel. For the last nine years, starting in M?crosöft Research and now in the Business Applications Division, he has been focusing on Intentional Programming, a user-extendible programming environment that strives for maximal reuse of software components by separating high level intentions from implementation detail. Charles holds a degree in science and in engineering mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a doctorate in computer science from Stanford.
These appointments underscore M?crosöft’s commitment to our technical people as key partners in the leadership of the company. I am tremendously excited about the opportunity ahead to once again redefine the technology landscape, and to do so in a way that benefits our customers, our partners and our shareholders. Please join me in recognizing these remarkable employees. Thanks.
Steve