Xamarin co-founder Miguel de Icaza is leaving Microsoft

On March 2, well-known open source advocate and developer Miguel de Icaza confirmed to ZDNnet that he has decided to leave Microsoft and will take a break before switching jobs. De Icaza joined Microsoft as a co-founder when Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016.

Since De Icaza's colleague and former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman left Microsoft in November 2021, there has been speculation that De Icaza will also leave Microsoft. Nat Friedman was the CEO of Microsoft's GitHub division. Friedman said: Late last year, he decided to go back to his entrepreneurial roots.

De Icaza joined Microsoft for just over six years. Recently, he has been working on various artificial intelligence projects in the ONNX team. ONNX stands for Open Neural Network Exchange, an evolving standard format for machine learning models, championed by Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. De Icaza worked with the team to get ONNX running on Android and iOS to support mobile developers using Xamarin.

When asked about his next steps, De Icaza said: "I'm going to take a break while the kids go to school and then go on vacation with them. Living in this industry is like being a kid in a candy store - so much happens. , there are so many options. So I want to spend some time tasting some candies and then decide which one I want to buy.”

De Icaza says he has about a 99 percent chance of going down the entrepreneurial path. "If I wanted to work for a big company, I'd stay here (Microsoft). It's been fantastic here, I've learned a lot, which is good, but I do miss the world of startups and building and managing a team. This is something I haven't done in this role at Microsoft.

At present, De Icaza has not disclosed the specific resignation date and related successors.

About Xamarin

Xamarin was founded in 2011 to make mobile development fast and easy. Xamarin's products simplify application development for multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Mac Apps. Xamarin was founded and participated by many well-known open source community developers, and is also the leader of the Mono project - an open source, cross-platform implementation of C# and the .NET framework.