Congratulations to Werner Vogels, the now legendary CTO of Amazon and one of the principle drivers of the Amazon Web Services vision. InfoWorld announced Sunday that Werner earned its CTO of the Year award. The accolades are rolling in from all over, but I think all agree that this was a well-deserved recognition for Werner and his team. In fact, Werner's recognition of the team effort that led to this award just makes him that much more of a class act.
What leaves me shaking my head, however, is that it took this long to see the incredible feat that Amazon pulled off, and the leadership that pushed a retail goods company to see compute capacity as a logical extension of their business.... Read more
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Adam D'Angelo is reportedly leaving the company to take some time off, and the social-networking site has apparently confirmed the departure.
D'Angelo, who is 23 and one of the company's early employees, reportedly sent a letter on Friday to Facebook staff about the move. Sources told Kara Swisher of All Things Digital that D'Angelo felt the position no longer fit well with his skills or interests. There have also reportedly been rumors of tension between D'Angelo and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who have known each other since high school.
Zuckerberg moved Facebook's offices from Boston to Palo Alto, Calif., in 2005 in part to be closer to D'Angelo, who was attending Caltech at the time, according to an article in the Harvard Crimson.
D'Angelo'd move comes as Facebook has reportedly borrowed $100 million to pay for the expansion of its server farms and cover other infrastructure expenses.
When word came Monday that Jerry Yang was replacing the embattled Terry Semel as CEO of Yahoo, we couldn't help flashing back all the way to last week to the company's annual shareholders meeting.
Jerry Yang
(Credit: Yahoo)It couldn't have been a happy occasion for Semel, who was on the spot to defend Yahoo's performance, its executive pay packages (that is, his own very generous compensation), the unexpected departure of Chief Technology Officer Farzad Nazem, and on and on.
On that date, Yang was serving as the interim CTO, so one shareholder asked whether the Yahoo co-founder--long known as Chief Yahoo, along with co-founder David Filo--should be appointed to that post permanently.
The now ironic reply from Semel, just six days before Yang took his job in the corner office: "If Jerry would think hard about being our CTO, I would be very flattered and honored."
Funny how things work out sometimes.
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