Sun's Marc Tremblay leaves for Microsoft

Microsoft is the world's largest software maker and one of the biggest companies of any type in the entire world. The software giant has been on a hiring spree snapping up many of the most influential engineers and executives in the technology market.

EWeek reports that Microsoft has now hired Sun's former CTO of Microelectronics, Marc Tremblay. Tremblay will leave Sun for Microsoft to become a Microsoft distinguished engineer.

Sun issued a statement saying in part, "Sun can confirm that Marc Tremblay, Sun Fellow and CTO for Microelectronics, has decided to leave the company. Rick Hetherington, who has served as co-CTO for Microelectronics with Tremblay, will assume leadership. We thank Marc for his many contributions over the last eighteen years and wish him all the best in his future endeavors. Hetherington has been with Sun for more than ten years and has served as co-CTO for the Microelectronics business unit for two years. Prior to that he spent sixteen years with Digital Equipment Corp. working on various processors and systems."

The Wall Street Journal reports that Tremblay will join Microsoft's Strategic Software/Silicon Architectures group known as SiArch. While Tremblay's exact tasks within the group are unknown, the WSJ predicts that he will be helping the software giant with new processors for the Xbox division and to develop new operating systems and software that will run on a variety of chips with more than one core.

Tremblay worked for Sun for 18 years and Microsoft snagging him signals yet another blow to an already weakening Sun. Sun has been actively pursuing a purchase by another company and was in heavy discussions with IBM. IBM reportedly made an offer that was not up to the expectations of Sun's board and IBM then walked away from the negotiations.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14809

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This is very interesting, it makes me wonder if Microsoft wants more hand in the actual chip development for the next generation Xbox they are no doubt designing right now. In any case, it looks like pre-production or actual development is starting about now or has already started.

what did sun do/make?

but this does sound pretty awesome. edit; thanks squilliam :D

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA)[3] is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982.[4] The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC processors as well as AMD's Opteron and Intel's Xeon processors; storage systems; and, a suite of software products including the Solaris Operating System, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Other technologies of note include the Java platform, MySQL and NFS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems

Very interesting indeed. They are definitely up to something in Redmond.

Sun makes many things, but if Microsoft is hiring people away from them then it's probably to work on either the operating system or the .NET platform, not games. If they want to get game programmers, they'll hire them away from game developers, and Sun isn't one of those.

i think he is saying for ms's new console.    =D

No one said he was going to be a games programmer.

"the WSJ predicts that he will be helping the software giant with new processors for the Xbox division and to develop new operating systems and software that will run on a variety of chips with more than one core."

Sun makes excellent storage archives. I suspect that Marc will most likely work in and on Microsofts server farms. It's what he has expertise in. The things WSJ theorizes is headline grabbing news but definitely not reality based. Sun excelled in servers and storage. That is where he's going to fit in best at Microsoft.

He also has a wide list of contacts with many of the large media firms.

Good points.  Microsoft does have a rather large cloud computing platform rolling out.  He could have something to do with that.  Which could also tie into the next console.