After nearly two decades of working for Microsoft, Xbox director of development and founder of Xbox Live Boyd Multerer announces on Twitter that he is leaving his long-time employer "to do something new."
Multerer, who has been with Microsoft for 18 years, says he is not yet ready to reveal what his newest venture is, but says he is having fun writing code and exploring new ideas every day.
Goodbye Microsoft. It was a good run. Xbox was Great! Time to do something new.
— Boyd Multerer (@BoydMulterer) Dec. 29, 2014
Not yet ready to say what that new thing is… But OMG is writing code very day and exploring ideas fun! — Boyd Multerer (@BoydMulterer) Dec. 29, 2014
Wow. Lots of kind words coming in today. I’m proud to have affected so many and hope to continue doing so! — Boyd Multerer (@BoydMulterer) Dec. 29, 2014
This marks the latest exodus of an Xbox executive this year. Multerer follows in the footsteps of former Xbox vice president Marc Whitten, who left the company in March to become chief product officer at Sonos. Ben Smith, Xbox TV program manager, now also works at Sonos. In October, Xbox Entertainment Studios (XES) president Nancy Tellem and executive vice president Jordan Levin also departed the company as Microsoft wound down XES.
Multerer, who helped build the Xbox 360 and headed the development of the Xbox One platform, was already on sabbatical since the launch of Xbox One, during which he worked with his wife Keri to launch Silkwords, an interactive romance and erotic fiction subscription website. He is hailed by Microsoft as Xbox's "father of invention," as he led the development of Xbox Live, which launched in 2002. Today, more than 46 million gamers subscribe to Xbox Live, for which Multerer and his team received a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award and an internal Microsoft Technical Achievement Award.
However, Xbox wasn't an easy platform for game developers, so Multerer left Xbox Live to develop XNA, a game programming language based on .Net Framework that allows developers to create video games. One of the goals of XNA was to make coding fun and easy for students, who can write code and run it on their Xbox. XNA is now used in thousands of universities and serves as the basis of several casual game developing platforms available.
@BoydMulterer Thank you so much for XNA ! Made my career to video games :) — Vernier Gratien (@VernierGratien) Dec. 29, 2014
@BoydMulterer awww :( you did an amazing job. Good luck in your future. You inspired me to finish school and get into ComputerScience — Gaming_with_Ripply (@Jbl277) Dec. 30, 2014
Multerer began coding at the age of 12, when he begged his parents for his first computer, while alternating with his other hobby, rockets. In high school, he competed with the National Association of Rocketry before moving on to take mechanical engineering in college, where he was constantly seeing ways to incorporate computers into engineering.
"My professors had no idea what to do with me," he says. "It was mechanical engineering. Most of them didn't even have computers."
After working in general engineering post-graduation, Multerer decided to establish Zephyr Design, a desktop publishing startup that was eventually purchased by Adobe before he joined Microsoft.
"I feel very fortunate to have been in the position to do those things," he says. "I guess I was just in the right place at the right time and focused on finding the next interesting thing I could do."
