Dean Hachamovitch, the longtime leader of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, is leaving the role — announcing this morning that he will be starting a new team inside the company.
“I’m changing roles at Microsoft, and excited to start a new team to take on something new. Microsoft will of course continue to invest in the browser, in Web standards, in developer tooling for the Web, in privacy, and in even more areas than before. There’s a new set of capable leaders who will continue the strong work,” Hachamovitch said in his post.
Microsoft declined to comment beyond that, and I haven’t been able to get anyone inside the company to spill the beans yet, although I’m hearing that it’s a “very new effort.”
Hachamovitch oversaw the company’s effort to revive Internet Explorer, famously apologizing in 2006 for the lack of development work on the browser in the early part of the last decade.
Facing declining market share and competition from Firefox and Chrome, the company went on to transform IE with new security measures, performance improvements and adherence to web standards — culminating most recently with last week’s release of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley cites a source saying that there will no longer be a single IE “chief.” The change in leadership comes amid the broader restructuring of Microsoft. IE and Windows are part of the new operating division led by Terry Myerson, the former Windows Phone chief.
The mystery around Hachamovitch’s new team may not last long. He notes in his post, “I expect to continue blogging in the near future at a different Microsoft address on a new topic.”
