Facebook really wanted to hire Scott Guthrie. That’s one revelation from the internal Facebook documents leaked by NBC this week.
Mashable reporter Karissa Bell spotted this exchange between Facebook execs that shows how the social media giant was recruiting Guthrie in 2014. Axios’ Ina Fried confirmed that Facebook “heavily recruited” Guthrie.
Guthrie joined Microsoft in 1997 and became a respected leader who came out of Microsoft’s Developer Division, where he pushed the company to expand its horizons and incorporate more open-source tools and technologies beyond Microsoft’s own platforms.
Based on the internal docs, Facebook was eyeing Guthrie in early 2014. But in February of that year, Guthrie ultimately replaced Satya Nadella as the head of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group as Nadella transitioned to CEO.
Guthrie has held that role since then — the group is now called Cloud and AI — as Microsoft has invested heavily in Azure and other related cloud services that are bolstering the company’s bottom line. Microsoft just beat out Amazon for a highly-coveted $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract, demonstrating its clout in the growing cloud industry.
Seems like it was a good decision for Guthrie to stay put at Microsoft, which reclaimed the title of world’s most valuable company late last year and has stayed mostly out of the anti-trust and political spotlight that is squarely on companies including Facebook. Axios proclaimed earlier this year that “Microsoft is winning the techlash.”
