Mark brown microsoft

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And one question has many people here puzzled: "Whatever happened to Marc Brown? Marc Brown, for those who didn't read the trial transcripts, was a Microsoft employee, who was Microsoft's official nominee to the Board of phone maker Sendo.

That was when Sendo cancelled the contract, and then sued Microsoft for a long list of horrible things, including fraud. But from the date when the "alliance" was announced, Brown was on the board of Sendo. Nobody disputes that much. And he was also still employed by Microsoft; that, too, isn't in dispute.

My question to Microsoft is this: Does Marc Brown, director of Microsoft's corporate development and strategy group, still have a job at Microsoft? For some reason, this question has an answer which is top secret.

After gossip here at Cannes, I think I understand why: and the clue, people are saying, comes in Microsoft's counter-suit against Sendo. Here's the problem. Sendo pulled out of the deal to produce the Z smartphone, on the grounds that Microsoft was trying to bankrupt the phone company, and steal its secrets - and that it had, in fact, already pre-empted this coup by giving these secrets to Taiwanese hardware builder, HTC. The trick, according to Sendo's court statement, was in the contract.

The deal between Microsoft and Sendo said that Microsoft would give Sendo money to build the phone, and provide software to make it work. Sendo would build the phone, and deliver it by end October If this didn't happen, then Sendo would be in breach of contract.

And the sting - if Sendo at any stage went bust, all its assets would become the property of Microsoft. Microsoft, says Sendo, deliberately attempted to bankrupt the smaller company; because it didn't deliver the software necessary to make the phone work, and wouldn't provide the money until the phone worked - thus effectively starving Sendo of working capital, and forcing it into bankruptcy.

That much is all in the official claim. And the counter claim, by Microsoft, is that Sendo was in financial trouble, and hid this from Microsoft which, when it found out, naturally tried to have Sendo wound up to protect its interests.

As far as anybody can find out, Marc Brown - a Microsoft employee - attended every Sendo Board meeting, at which the ongoing financial situation with Microsoft was widely discussed. There are minutes of every Board meeting. They are on file. Marc Brown, therefore, knew everything there was to know, surely? So if Microsoft didn't know what Marc Brown knew, we have some interesting options.

Either, Brown carelessly forgot to mention the impending financial disaster which threatened Sendo, which many employers would regard as culpable misbehaviour. Or, alternatively, Brown deliberately concealed these figures from Microsoft and was a party to the fraud. Or, perhaps, he slept through all the Board meetings. Whichever way, the question comes back to the one we started with.

If Brown failed to notice, or failed to report, the significance of these figures, it would sound to most of us like a severe dereliction of duty - with the phrase "culpable and severe misconduct" often mentioned in conversations here in Cannes.

Indeed, most HR staff would find such behaviour hard to forgive. So is Microsoft employing him? And if so, wouldn't this ever so slightly suggest that Microsoft doesn't honestly think there was any fraud at all, but that it is simply a way of drawing out the lawsuit?

Or are we discovering a hitherto unsuspected soft, forgiving, and warm cuddly-bunny side to Microsoft? On Call A warning from the past in today's On Call. Helpfulness is not always rewarded with a pat on the back and a slap-up meal on expenses.

Our tale comes from a reader Regomised as Derek and concerns his time working for a multinational with plants at multiple locations in the UK.

A cry for help had to be answered within the hour. One of the plants would start production at on Monday mornings, but started work four hours earlier to make sure things were up to speed.

It had two main buildings. One was an office unit, housing the comms and server rooms. The other had an equipment room, with switches and patch panels as well as an operations room with client PCs and expensively large monitors. In conjunction with a White House meeting on Thursday at which technology companies discussed the security of open source software, Google proposed three initiatives to strengthen national cybersecurity. The meeting was arranged last month by US national security adviser Jake Sullivan, amid the scramble to fix the Log4j vulnerabilities that occupied far too many people over the holidays.

Sullivan asked invited firms — a group that included Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle — to share ideas on how the security of open source projects might be improved.