Microsoft's Sinofsky, by the numbers

The company has applied that term incessantly to Windows 8 and Windows RT, using it to describe everything from IE10's performance to how the "Windows 8 Store," formerly "Metro," UI operates.

About the only thing Microsoft didn't do was commandeer the fastandfluid.com website, which was registered by someone in the U.K. just days after last year's BUILD conference.

10: The version of the final Internet Explorer Sinofsky was responsible for completing. IE10 for Windows 8 and Windows RT debuted last month when those two operating systems launched. A preview for Windows 7 shipped Tuesday.

The other browsers released under Sinofsky's watch, 2009's IE8 and 2011's IE9, collectively accounted for 44.6% of all browsers used worldwide in October. (Although IE7 shipped after Sinofsky assumed control of Windows, as with Vista, he apparently had little to do with it, coming too late to the development party.)

21.97: The price, on Amazon.com, of the Kindle edition of One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making, the 2009 book Sinofsky co-authored with Marco Iansit of Harvard Business School. The book recounts Sinofsky's takeover of the Windows group after the Vista disaster, and uses the development of Windows 7 to impart business lessons.

23: The number of years Sinofsky was employed by Microsoft. He started working at the company in July 1989, three years after the company went public, as a software design engineer, according to his corporate bio, which remains on the Microsoft site, as does his photo on the company's senior leadership page.

8,578: The number of words in Sinofsky's longest entry on the Building Windows 8 blog, a Feb. 9, 2012, epistle entitled "Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture," that described what was then called "Windows on ARM" (WOA) but which was later renamed "Windows RT."

Sinofsky even poked fun at his reputation for verbosity in his final memo to Microsoft employees. "I have always promised myself when the right time came for me to change course, I would be brief, unlike one of my infamous short blog posts," he wrote Monday.

1,530,000: The amount of money, in cash, that Sinofsky was awarded in September that represented 20% of his fiscal 2012 bonus. The remaining 80% was delivered as stock that was to vest over a four-year period if he remained employed by Microsoft.

17,379,303: The dollar value of Sinofsky's holdings of Microsoft stock at Wednesday's closing price of $26.84. According to an early October proxy statement, Sinofsky had 647,515 shares as of mid-September 2012.

670 million: The number of personal computers Microsoft claims are running Windows 7, easily Sinofsky's greatest success during his two-decades-plus time at Microsoft.

Billions: The potential liability Microsoft faces in fines determined by European Union antitrust regulators for neglecting to serve millions of users with a mandated browser ballot screen.

The blunder began in February 2011 when Sinofsky's division shipped Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), and ran into early July, when Microsoft corrected the oversight. The company called it a "technical error," and apologized.

It's unlikely that the final fine will come close to the maximum possible -- which has been estimated between $7.3 billion and $8.9 billion -- but the EU's head regulator, Joaquin Almunia, has talked tough. "If companies enter into commitments, they must do what they have committed to do or face the consequences," Almunia said during an October news conference to announce that his agency had filed formal charges against Microsoft.

The browser ballot screw-up was another factor the Microsoft board cited when it chopped Sinofsky's 2012 bonus earlier this year.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

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