James announced to the world (and it’s all over the tech news) that he’s moving to Amazon. This is a huge loss for Microsoft but I am super happy for James because, as he says in his blog post, change is good.

Through my interactions with him, I came to realize that he’s super super smart and passionate about the things that he does. He’s a great role model!

James has been super nice to me. We’ve interacted on some datacenter-related work and he’s even trusted me with one of his projects when he went on holidays, which made me feel very honored. He’s helped me tremendously the last few months with suggestions and advice about the next steps in my career and it was his finger that pointed me towards my current team in Live Search. I was looking forward to doing my stint in a product group so that I can then have the opportunity to work with him closely. You never know what the future will bring.

Amazon is doing an amazing job in Cloud Computing. With James, I am sure they are going to do even more amazing things.

All the best James!