Mike Davidson, a Seattle technology veteran and longtime designer, is joining Microsoft as the corporate vice president of design and research.
Davidson will head up design for the Web Experiences organization, which is in charge of MSN, Bing, the Edge Browser, and more. He succeeds Albert Shum, who left Microsoft in October after 15 years.
The move is a return to Redmond, Wash., and the campus where Davidson worked for msnbc.com/NBCNews.com after the news outlet acquired Newsvine, the Seattle-based citizen journalism startup he founded in 2005.
Davidson said in a post on his blog that he was excited about the scale of the work he will be doing at Microsoft.
“I’ve worked on the largest sports site in the world and one of the largest social networks in the world, but the properties in this group reach well over a billion people,” he wrote.
Davidson left NBC in 2012 and spent four years at Twitter as the VP of design and research before joining digital product design platform InVision in 2018.
He most recently led design efforts at Kraken, a San Francisco-based online exchange for digital currencies.
In his blog post, Davidson expressed excitement about a flexible hybrid work model and getting back to the office after working remotely for the last four years.
“Where you land depends on a mix of your personality, your life outside of work, and what type of job you have,” Davidson said. “For me personally, I very much like being around people and feel like I do better work when I am … but I also like getting back my commute time a couple of days a week.”
