Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Microsoft Employee Who Tweeted About Unreleased Nokia Windows Phone Now an Ex-Employee

A Microsoft worker who two weeks ago tweeted about an unreleased Nokia Windows Phone is now no longer with the company.

Joe Marini, who was a principal program manager for the Windows Phone team, raised a number of eyebrows two weeks ago when he tweeted his impressions of the device. Despite the posts, Marini delivered his scheduled talk at last week’s Build developer conference in Anaheim, Calif. That, however, appears to have been his swan song as a Microsoft employee.

“We routinely do not discuss personnel matters, but I can confirm that Joe Marini no longer works at Microsoft,” a Microsoft representative told AllThingsD. Seattle-area tech site GeekWire, which broke news of his ouster, said that Marini stepped down after being informed that he would have been let go for violating the company’s social media policy.

Marini did not immediately return requests for comment.

Marini’s free flow of tweets — which are still online — began with this Sept. 7 post.

“I just got a chance to try out one of the slickest looking #Nokia phones I have ever seen,” he wrote. “Soon, you will too!” Then, in case anyone missed the point, he added the Windows Phone 7 hashtag.

But Marini wasn’t done. He then followed up with tweets giving the phone a rating of “8,” (presumably out of 10) adding that “the camera was good, but I didn’t have optimal lighting.”

“I’d like a larger screen too,” he said.

Hint: If you are going to tweet about your company’s key partner’s unreleased products, you might want to give them a “9” or a “10.”

In any case, Nokia has said it is aiming to release its first Windows Phone-based devices this year. So the rest of us shouldn’t have to wait too much longer to find out what had Marini so excited.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald