Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair Creative Commons licensed under BY-NC.
Mark Lucovsky was the other man in the room when Steve Ballmer threw his chair and called Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy.”
Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired.com, seven years later. “If you play golf with Steve and he loses a five-cent bet, he’s pissy for the next week. Should it surprise you that when I tell Steve I’m quitting and going to work for Google, he would get animated?”
The famous flying chair shows just how volatile Steve Ballmer can be, but it also underlines the talent Mark Lucovsky brings to the art of software engineering. Lucovsky joined Microsoft in 1988 as part of the team that designed and built the company’s Windows NT operating system — which still provides the core code for all Windows releases — and after joining Google, he was one of three engineers who created the search giant’s AJAX APIs, online programming tools that drew more traffic than almost any other service at Google. “[He's] probably in the top 99.9 percentile when it comes to engineers,” says Paul Maritz, the CEO of virtualization kingpin VMware, who worked with Lucovsky as a top exec at Microsoft.
That’s why Maritz turned the tables on Google and coaxed Lucovsky to VMware.
No, Maritz didn’t recruit his old colleague just to squeeze some extra speed from the “hypervisor” that delivers the company’s virtual servers. He wanted VMware to build a new software platform for the internet age, and he relied on Lucovsky to tell him what that would be. Lucovsky pulled in a few more “99.9 percentile” engineers — including the two who helped him build Google’s AJAX APIs, Derek Collison and Vadim Spivak — and little more than a year and a half later, they delivered Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Foundry has many authors, most notably Collison, known for building the TIBCO Rendezvous messaging system that sped data across Wall Street’s machines in the ’90s. But you might describe Cloud Foundry as a culmination of Lucovsky’s career: It takes the idea of a widely used software platform like Windows NT and applies it to the sort of sweeping infrastructure Google erected to run its massively popular web services. But then it goes further. After building the platform, Lucovksy and Collison convinced Maritz and company to open source it, letting others have it for no charge. In the words of Maritz, VMware seeks to provide “the 21st-century equivalent of Linux.”
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