Gavin Kim is a man who gets around. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked at Motorola between November 2003 and January 2007 where his main role there was to interface with Sprint. Over a year, in July 2008, he began working at Samsung, where he was tasked with “leading development of Samsung Mobile’s software and services offerings, incubating Samsung’s content and developer partnerships, and building Samsung Mobile’s Enterprise Business.” He left in October 2011. Today’s story doesn’t concern Motorola, nor Samsung, but instead Kim’s third employer: Microsoft. He was their Windows Phone Marketing Manager between November 2011 and … now. Total length of employment? Less than half a year. That’s kind of brutal, especially now that the Lumia 900 has been out on the market for less than two weeks. So why did Kim leave? Here’s what Microsoft is willing to say about the situation:
“We can confirm that Gavin Kim has made a personal decision to leave Microsoft. We feel very good about the work he has done to set the team, and its new lead Eugene Ho, up for success. We wish him all the best.”
Late last year, in December, another high level Microsoft employee working on Windows Phone left his post. Andy Lees was the head of Windows Phone, as in top dog, but due to reasons we’ll never really know (likely poor sales), he was replaced by Terry Myerson. We don’t know who will take Kim’s place, but we’ll be able to tell a lot about the future of Windows Phone by the company’s decision. If Microsoft picks a guy who used to be in Windows sales, then we’ll know that they want to work extremely hard on selling consumers the integration benefits that having a Windows 8 PC and a Windows Phone 8 device. If they choose someone who used to work at a handset vendor, then they’ll likely be trying to better partner with operators.