J Allard's goodbye note: ‘No chairs were thrown’
Microsoft Chief Experience Officer J Allard sent out a goodbye note of his own on May 25, the date that Microsoft announced officially that both Allard and Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach are leaving the company.
Context & Ripple Effects
J Allard's farewell note lands the same day Microsoft formally confirms what the syndicated coverage treats as one story, not two: the chief experience officer and Entertainment and Devices president Robbie Bach are both out, with outlets from CNET to Asymco reading the pair as a reorg of the consumer business ('the reason Robbie Bach was fired', per Asymco) rather than coincidence.
The timing is awkward by any measure: the Kin One and Two were reviewed just three weeks earlier, positioned by critics as outsiders caught between a smartphone and a featurephone, so the leadership layer behind Microsoft's device bets is departing while those bets are being graded. It also caps a quiet month of senior departures — corporate VP of advertising research Alex Gounares exited in early May — and closes a chapter that ran back through the Windows Vista transition era captured in What Comes Next.
First-order effects
- Entertainment and Devices — home to Xbox, Zune, and the phone effort — loses its president and chief experience officer simultaneously, leaving Steve Ballmer to absorb direct oversight of the consumer business while a successor structure is worked out.
- Allard's 'no chairs were thrown' line is a direct rebuttal of the forced-exit narrative that syndicated headlines like Asymco's 'fired' framing pushed within hours of the announcement.
Second-order effects
- Bach's own exit interview with TechFlash signals the outgoing leadership will shape the story publicly, forcing Microsoft to define the consumer strategy's next owner fast enough to outrun the 'reorg' framing already circulating across CNET and the blogs.
- The Kin phones' tepid reception now gets judged without their champions in the building, raising the internal cost of the next device bet and inviting rivals to read the shakeup as hesitation on Microsoft's consumer ambitions.
Third-order effects
- With Gounares, Bach, and Allard all gone inside a single month, the cluster points toward a generational turnover among the executives who built Microsoft's entertainment franchise, and a consumer organization likely rebuilt closer to the corporate center than the independent division Bach ran.
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft's device-and-entertainment bets will increasingly be evaluated against the same integration logic applied to the rest of the company — a structural test of whether standalone consumer units can survive inside a platform company.
The trend: Microsoft's consumer-hardware leadership is churning out ahead of a consolidation of the devices business into the corporate mainstream, with each senior exit resetting how the next product cycle will be judged.