A lot of people have commented about how sad they are that Sara Williams has left Microsoft. I certainly agree. She was a huge asset to the company and the person I was most often pointed to by my management as a role model of how to succeed at the company.
More specifically, I respect Sara because she is the antithesis of one of the things I hate: irresponsible people who passive aggressively complain in public about things they don’t like instead of doing the hard work to actually make changes happen.
Sara’s legacy is the new face of Microsoft’s community effort. It’s always been very easy for someone to fire off a whinemail about how Microsoft wasn’t transparent enough to customers. It wasn’t easy, however, to actually take the initiative to build and maintain the infrastructure that enabled GotDotNet or blogs.msdn.com. But that’s just what Sara did. Changing Microsoft isn’t hard—it’s practically impossible.
She didn’t have to write an “I’m so much smarter than [insert group here]—why don’t they respect me?” blog posting. She didn’t have to write an open letter to Steve Ballmer complaining about how [insert group here] wasn’t doing their job. She merely did what had to be done to make the company better.
Sara, I wish you the best of luck!
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