Microsoft appoints Jim DuBois as new CIO
Jim DuBois. Photo via Microsoft. — Microsoft this afternoon announced Jim DuBois as the company's chief information officer. — DuBois had served as the interim CIO for the past six months and replaced Tony Scott, who left after five years with the company to be CIO of VMWare.
Context & Ripple Effects
Jim DuBois's promotion closes out a six-month interim stretch that began with Tony Scott's departure in June 2013, when GeekWire reported he was leaving to focus on personal projects; this week's announcement confirmed he landed as CIO of VMware. Making the internal caretaker permanent is the low-friction resolution — DuBois already held the job in practice.
The appointment also continues an unusually fast rotation at the top of Microsoft's IT organization. Scott himself had been brought in via the January 2008 hire after Stuart Scott was pushed out in November 2007, meaning the company will have installed its fourth different chief information officer within roughly six years once DuBois's tenure counts.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's internal IT organization gets leadership certainty it has lacked since June: the interim tag is off DuBois, and any reorganization or vendor commitments that were parked pending a permanent decision can proceed under him.
- VMware formally gains a CIO with five years of running one of the world's largest corporate IT operations, straight from a direct competitor's bench.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise vendors selling into Microsoft's IT shop — hardware, cloud services, security tooling — face a fresh evaluation cycle, since a newly confirmed CIO typically resets supplier relationships rather than inheriting them.
- The move signals Microsoft prefers promoting from inside the IT organization over another external search, which raises the bar for outside candidates eyeing comparable big-company CIO roles.
Third-order effects
- If the churn pattern holds — four CIO transitions at Microsoft between 2007 and 2013 — the role risks being structured as a shorter-horizon operational seat rather than a long-tenure strategic one, pushing durable technology strategy upward toward the CEO and product leadership.
- The steady two-way flow of senior IT executives between Redmond and companies like VMware points toward a tighter national market for enterprise IT leadership, where large-tech CIO experience is the currency that trades across firms.
The trend: Large-enterprise CIO seats are becoming high-turnover rotational posts, with Microsoft now on its fourth chief information officer in six years and the role increasingly a stepping stone between major tech firms.