Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond. These details appear in newly released Department of Justice files linked to Epstein, which include emails showing the former Windows boss seeking advice …

[wolfetone]

I missed this with all the talk of Gate's issues with his own anti-virus...

[elsergiovolador]

Citizen Advice

Such a helpful guy that Epstein was. Surely there was no other person on the planet to give retirement advice.

Do journalists think people were born yesterday?

[Kurgan]

Re: Citizen Advice

The most interesting part is when Epstein said he could do something to stop MS from attacking Sinofsky. Like blackmailing the top C-level people at MS who went to his sex parties, maybe.

[retiredFool]

Re: Citizen Advice

Noticed this also. And for only 1M he would "handle" it.

[Dan 55]

Re: Citizen Advice

Well, his wife was mentored by Epstein after all.

And on that bombshell it's time to end.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Citizen Advice

Especially since he didn't live to retire and a large number of his associates also took an early exit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indicted

Was Sinofsky held accountable for the failure or did he leave on his own accord? Was it his idea to come up with something like Surface or did upper management order him to implement the device?

The $14 million (plus the savings he had before his exit) he received would be a nice retirement package in any case.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Indicted

What about the negative impact of TIFKAM, Windows 'Ape' (8). Win-10-nic, the ads, the strongarming, the 2D FLATSO, yotta yotta - all Sinofsky's baby...

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Indicted

Don't forget the Ribbon, which still hasn't caught on outside of MS.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: Indicted

I can think of four just off the top of my head. Two of them are PDF readers. The other two are AutoCAD and MATLAB, which are both about as serious and widely used as it gets in technical fields.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Indicted

Ribbon....that was Julie Larson-Green....in 2007.

Sinofski and Windows 8 was 2012.

Maybe someone else can map out s**t projects from M$ over time.......................

I certainly don't have the time....right now............

[Wellyboot]

Re: Indicted

There has to be a scapegoat to take the blame for expensive product failures, even when it's a 'me-too' lump that just shows how well thought out the Ipad competition was.

[kmorwath]

Re: Indicted

Especially, who came up with the whole RT bad idea and the "tablet" only UI for Windows 8?

Anyway, they are now pushing ARM only Surfaces to non-business users - which is another stupid idea as long as not enough Windows applications are compiled for ARM.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Indicted

I think you may be under-estimating the number of non-business users who hardly ever run non-MS apps, as well as the proportion of CPU time spent in OS-supplied libraries even when the app itself is not ported.

[kmorwath]

Re: Indicted

Evidently - not so many, at that price point. Moreover MS was late in the tablet business, so it had to catch up.

Apple was careful not ti put the word "Mac" into the iOS ecosystem - and keeping them separated - if you call something "Microsof Windows", and just ad RT at the end, it's not enough, and people do expect someting different. And anyway Windows still exists for the large number of third party applications available.

I could switch to Linux, probably, if it wasn't for my photo hobby - but there the only valid alternative is Apple. So anything called "Windows" that can't run most Windows applications properly becomes quite useless even for non-business users, many of whom do use non-MS applications - actually it's probably most non-tech business users who can live with MS Office and little else only.

The sudden exit of Sinofsky always made me wonder about who took that string of bad decisions, with very little grasp on reality.

[James O'Shea]

Re: Indicted

Err... you _do_ know that the first serious tablet computer things (that is, not doomed Apple Newtons, which lacked the Touch of The Steve because The Steve was still in exile and the idiots running Apple had no clue whatsoever) were from... Microsoft. In 2001-3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC

There was a violent attack of Do-Not-Want, even worse than with Surfaces. Apple Newtons got Doonesburied; https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/18/319/1714 but the Windows tablets were so bad that they weren't worth parodying.

[Steve Channell]

I liked Windows RT!

My Lenovo Yoga with its nVidia Tigra ARM CPU was my go anywhere laptop that would run Office {outlook, word, powerpoint, Excel, onenote} and remote-desktop all day with a single charge, but I only bought it in a half-price sale. Like an iPad, you could browse the web on the go, but unlike an IPad, you could edit documents. I genuinely enjoyed a scam call that asked for a TeamViewer download - playing along until it failed to run. The "f_ck" from the scammer when it inevitably failed was fun.

Windows RT failed primarily because of price.

[Dan 55]

Re: I liked Windows RT!

It was a Windows which didn't run Windows software, apart from Office on a locked-down desktop. Most people expect a Windows computer to be able to do that.

[Steve Channell]

Re: I liked Windows RT!

There was a registry switch to allow side-loading on Windows 8-RT: I installed and used Code::Blocks and Cygwin this way. Windows 8.1 RT locked-down the registry switch, but anything previously installed would continue to work. no x86 programs was a bind... but that would have been a problem anyway

[kmorwath]

Re: I liked Windows RT!

Microsoft made the same mistake it did with Windows Phone - it was unable to create an app ecosystem upon it, and also did not create good development tools for it - and there was no longer a Borland to fill the gap. And the times were Windows was the place to code for for most developers were gone. MS went so far to retire early the few RT applications it made good enough,.

My Surface 2 Pro is still useful today, and even if now a bit slow, it's still good enough to run Helicon Focus and Helicon Remote mounted on a tripod with the camera. Or Elinchrom Stuido with the Bluetooth/USB controller. It can also run the latest version of Lightroom, but became too slow but for simple edits. Still, the Wacom digitizer doesn't need a powered pen.

Had been a RT, it would have been set to the recycle center long ago.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: I liked Windows RT!

Someone bought a Surface Pro 2 at a previous workplace during a flirtation with replacing all our document travellers and job sheets with tablets (thankfully it never caught on). After a while dumped in the lab gathering dust I began using it as a work PC.

About the only time I ever found W8's interface usable was on that device and it was surprisingly pleasant to use for day to day stuff. Sadly by the time I'd found it the keyboard case had long since gone missing, but the onscreen keyboard was one of the best I've ever used.

[Jason Bloomberg]

Give me $14 million...

... and you won't have to worry about who I'd be working for, can be assured I wouldn't be working for anyone.

I guess I missed out on the avarice and greed gene.

[Kurgan]

Re: Give me $14 million...

If your lifestyle requires $1M annually, you cannot retire on just $14M. It's quite simple.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Give me $14 million...

Depends, if you're spending your money on various recreational chemicals or hoarding kompromat on Trump then there's a good chance $14 mil is all you'll need

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Give me $14 million...

"the avarice and greed gene."

I suspect it is more likely a congenital neurodegenerative slow virus or perhaps a prion. A mixture of shingles and mad cow disease ?

I would settle for Epstein's $1m. Don't these pricks have a life ? (Probably the definitive rhetorical question.)

[James O'Shea]

no comment

I saw Surface RT fail coming, and I don't even work at MS. I looked into getting one, and noted that:

1. it wasn't as good as the iPad I already had

2. it cost more than the wireless-only version of the iPad I already had

3. it couldn't run the full suite of Windows apps. Indeed, many of the apps it could run were crippled.

4. it had limited RAM, limited storage, limited connectivity (no cell service)

5. MS somehow managed the impossible: they built a keyboard worse than Apple's keyboards for iPads. Apple hasn't made a good keyboard since the 'Saratoga' keyboards of the late 1990s, with the possible exception of their (very expensive) new keyboards for iPads; this thing was worse than Apple's stuff.

Basically it was a crippled, expensive, iPad which lacked apps. I saw it as a dead device walking. I was right. I couldn't see a use case for it that an iPad wouldn't fit better, and probably cheaper. I was right about that, too.

Frankly, the only way I would have got a Surface RT would have been if MS sent me one for free. But that's me, YMMV.

[PhilipN]

Ballmer's excuse for writing off $1bn?

Seem to recall this was the occasion instead of admitting it was an unwanted piece of crap he said "We built too many".

[Dan 55]

Re: Ballmer's excuse for writing off $1bn?

It's technically correct. MS should have built 0 Surface RTs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that all?

A severance payment of $14m seems like a paltry sum for an executive that gave almost 25 years of service to M$. Apparently he steered Gates towards focusing on the Internet in the mid-90s, was instrumental in developing Office as well as leading the highly successful and profitable Windows 7 project.

Perhaps Epstein had meant to add another zero to his suggested figure?

[Dinanziame]

Re: Is that all?

The internet estimates his current wealth to over $300M. It's not very surprising considering the importance he had at Microsoft, and how the stock market went up since. It's more surprising that with this kind of money he still cared so much about his exit package.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is that all?

Well, during a time when certain 20-something scrotes were becoming overnight billionaires for simply stealing someone else's idea for a social network, he probably felt that his contributions were somewhat underappreciated!

[doublelayer]

Re: Is that all?

I'm not sure how much I'd trust an internet wealth estimate, but even if it's correct, it's useful to consider that Microsoft stock has been a rather good investment to have been in between 2012 and 2025 (quite a bad one for 2026 so far). Microsoft stock worth $300M on New Year's Day 2026 would have been worth $16.88M on New Year's 2013. So if he's been investing in Microsoft since then, that payment might have been rather significant for him.

[hitmouse]

And undermined every other project at Microsoft that he didn't own. Refused to cooperate with Windows team until he was a member of it. Hypocritic toady through and through.