| @BrianmacMSFT |
| University of Washington | |
| Computer Science |
As corporate vice president of Core Search Program Management, Brian MacDonald leads the program management team, overseeing the product feature set design and strategy for Live Search.
MacDonald joined Microsoft in 1989 when the company he co-founded was acquired by Microsoft, along with the full rights to the program they were developing which became Microsoft Project. Upon joining Microsoft he led the Project development team for its first two versions. Microsoft Project was an immediate success as customers gravitated to its unique design that provided a toolkit for doing project management in a variety of ways rather than dictating a single methodology. Project has been an industry leading project management solution since its release in 1991.
After releasing the 2.0 version of Project, MacDonald conceived of the product that became Microsoft Outlook and served as General Manager of the Microsoft Outlook team for its first release. MacDonald’s push to combine previously separate Personal Information Management and E-mail categories transformed how people think about and use e-mail.
MacDonald’s other work at Microsoft as vice president included working on subscription services, producing a billing system, hosted Exchange and incubating the project that became Microsoft Infopath. MacDonald left Microsoft in 2001 and was involved with board roles in several startups and returned in 2007 lured back by the opportunity to change how users interact with Search.
