A senior executive at Microsoft who has been with the company for 25 years has announced his departure. AllThingsDigital.com reports that Hank Vigil, currently the senior vice president of the Strategy and Partnership division at Microsoft, will still be a strategic adviser to the company even as he leaves to "focus on investing in and advising for early-stage start-up companies". His departure was revealed via an internal company memo.
Vigil has had a number of positions and jobs at Microsoft during his career at the company. He's done marketing for Microsoft's Office software suite and helped once led the company's Digital Television Group division. In that job he lead the team that acquired WebTV in the 1990s which was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to merge the Internet with TVs via a set top box. More recently Vigil helped to make strategic agreements with a number of outside companies including "Facebook, Nokia, France Telecom, Vodafone, NBC Universal Inc., News Corp., Time Warner and Viacom Inc" according to his official Microsoft online bio.
In his last position as senior VP of the Strategy and Partnership division, Vigil worked directly with current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on "developing and managing strategic relationships, mergers, acquisitions and investment partnerships with media, consumer electronics, telecommunications, software and Internet companies." The AllThingsDigital.com story adds that Vigil is " ... one of the company’s most visible and well-liked execs in the tech community, especially in Silicon Valley." That should help him in his new venture to help out start up companies. The article also humorously states that Vigil is "Microsoft’s best-dressed exec."
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