The name Frank X. Shaw isn’t as well known outside the company as those of Microsoft’s other senior leaders, and that’s the nature of the job. But behind the scenes, the company’s longtime communications chief has shaped its public image for nearly three decades, working for all three of its CEOs and handling its biggest stories along the way, from antitrust to AI.

Shaw announced in September that he’s leaving Microsoft at the end of the year. On this week’s GeekWire Podcast, he sits down for what amounts to an exit interview. We’re joined in the conversation by longtime Microsoft beat reporter Mary Jo Foley, editor in chief of Directions on Microsoft and a GeekWire contributing writer.

Shaw talks candidly about working for Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, and about the situations he’d handle differently. He describes his behind-the-scenes dealings with some of the top reporters in tech, from an executive’s objection to a single word to the heated argument that changed how he saw his job.

He also reflects on how communications and media are changing in the AI era, and explains why trust still comes down to a belief in the person telling the story.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights.

On Microsoft’s three CEOs: Shaw says intensity is what the three have in common, expressed differently: “Steve was outwardly intense. Satya is quietly intense, and Bill is cuttingly intense.”

Ballmer was the hardest to explain to the public, he says, because the loud-salesman caricature hid a thoughtful, detail-oriented leader who often played the boisterous public role because Microsoft’s sales force needed it.

On the clarity of hindsight: Big decisions look obvious once they work out, Shaw says. His example is the board’s choice of Satya Nadella as CEO. It’s seen as a no-brainer now, but at the time there was a lot of debate, there were other candidates, and it was a hard, complicated decision.

“When you get a decision right, it always looks easy afterwards,” he says. “If you get it wrong, you were just an idiot all along.”

On speaking up: A communications leader should weigh in when a decision could damage the brand, Shaw says, and he learned that the hard way.

When Mary Jo asks how he decides when to push back on executives, she raises the Kin as an example. Shaw says he thought the phone would fail. It was late to market, and it would cost more than people expected because it required a data plan. Engineers he talked to had their doubts, too.

But when Ballmer went around the table asking whether to launch it, Shaw stayed quiet, unsure a communications executive had standing to weigh in. Microsoft pulled it within weeks.

In hindsight, he says, framing it as a brand risk would have given him standing to speak: if the Kin failed, it would cause significant brand damage and hurt Microsoft with the younger audience it was trying to reach. He doubts speaking up would have changed the decision, but says he would have felt better about it.

On underestimating a story: A story that doesn’t get much initial attention can still define a company for years. Shaw’s example: Vanity Fair’s 2012 “lost decade” story.

As he recounts it, reporter Kurt Eichenwald told him, “If you don’t give me Steve and Bill, I’m just going to write a hit piece,” and then did. Shaw says he should have escalated to Vanity Fair sooner, and he underestimated how a story that got little immediate pickup would shape how reporters described Microsoft for the next four years.

On narratives: Continuing on that theme, Shaw says facts can be disputed but “narratives are sticky,” and a company can only change one by changing its own behavior. In the 2000s, he says, every story described Microsoft as “a convicted monopolist,” and ending stack ranking was part of how the company moved past the lost-decade image.

On what makes a good story: Shaw recalls having a shouting match with Rob Guth, then a Wall Street Journal reporter, over an article Shaw no longer remembers. It got heated enough that Shaw pulled his car over in Madison Park to keep arguing. (Guth now works as a writer and researcher for Bill Gates.)

Guth told him he was bad at his job because he thought the job was getting positive stories. What Shaw should want, Guth said, were interesting stories that showed something real about the company. Some would be less flattering, but they would be more memorable.

Shaw told him he was wrong. But after thinking it over, he concluded Guth was exactly right. A story about a product built perfectly that everyone loves is boring, he says. “That’s like the plane landed safely. Nobody cares.” The coverage worth hoping for illuminates part of the company in a memorable way, and that always comes with tension.

On taking risks with reporters: Cooperating on a story you can’t control is a risk worth taking when the result shows something real about the company, Shaw says. Asked by Mary Jo for an example, he points to The New Yorker’s long piece on Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, featuring Kevin Scott, the Microsoft chief technology officer.

Microsoft agreed to it knowing that the writer, Charles Duhigg, would talk to many people and test a thesis along the way, so there was no telling what would come out. Then Sam Altman’s brief ouster from OpenAI happened right before the story went to press. It was a risky story, Shaw says, but it captured the company at a revealing moment.

On corrections: Shaw’s test is whether something is “irritating” or “damaging.” Only factual errors that matter are worth pursuing, he says.

His example is a Bloomberg story by Dina Bass that described an executive as having “wooed” customers. The executive hated the word and wanted it changed, so Shaw made what he calls the run up the hill, pressing Bass on the exec’s behalf and asking her to check with her editors.

She pointed out that she hadn’t quoted the executive using the word, and the editors left it alone. The executive didn’t like it, Shaw says, but it wasn’t wrong.

On speaking with one voice: Shaw says a big part of his job was trying to ensure that a company of Microsoft’s size made sense to the world.

He recalls a Seattle Times reporter who got 26 pitches from Microsoft in one week and asked him which ones Microsoft thought were important. Sending pitches indiscriminately was a mistake, he says. The company needed to decide what three or four things mattered most and focus its messaging on those.

On building in public: Asked about recent internal memos pointing Microsoft toward more voices and less central messaging as he departs, Shaw says the company already has many employees talking about its products on LinkedIn, X and Reddit, and that’s a good thing.

Someone from Microsoft answering questions in a Reddit Excel thread doesn’t need to be babysat by the communications team, he says. He sees it as a continuation of what Microsoft did with Channel 9 and thousands of MSDN blogs.

At the same time, he says, there are moments, such as a big event or a major launch, when the company needs to break through.

“Every once in a while you want the world to know Microsoft had something to say today,” he says. That’s hard, it takes real effort, and it can’t happen every week or even every month, so the company has to pick those moments and do them right.

On AI and the media: AI can help spokespeople prepare, Shaw says, but asking it what Mary Jo will ask, for example, produces “generic Mary Jo questions.” The best interviewers, he says, deliberately avoid the predictable question.

On reporters’ styles: Preparing a spokesperson means knowing how a particular reporter works, Shaw says, and that comes from people who have sat through many of their interviews. His example is Steven Levy, the veteran tech journalist and Wired editor at large, who Shaw says can lull you with 10 minutes of easygoing conversation, then hit you with one sharp question after another.

Other reporters always sound negative in interviews but write straightforward stories, he says, and an executive who reads too much into the tone risks getting knocked off their game.

Asked to name the toughest reporter he has dealt with, Shaw pushes back on the label. Good reporters are tricky to work with because their job is to find things out and surprise you with what they know, he says. That doesn’t make them tough. What makes a situation difficult is usually a story with real conflict and tension, not the reporter.

On Microsoft in the AI era: Shaw sees AI in a transitional moment, moving away from a constant focus on the models themselves. Right now, he says, every new model release or manifesto makes everyone stop and look.

He hopes the attention will shift from new models to whether AI is actually useful, and he says that’s where Microsoft has historically been strongest.

Acknowledging that he’s still on the payroll and rooting for the company, he offers an analogy that will resonate with anyone who learned to drive a stick shift. The AI model companies want to drop a bigger, more powerful engine into businesses, and the result is often a lot of grinding of gears.

“We’re the clutch,” he says. Microsoft’s infrastructure, in his telling, lets companies absorb that power and get moving without the disruption of a new engine and a demand to go 110 miles per hour.

On journalism: “People trust what they hear because they trust the people,” Shaw says. Deep knowledge of a beat becomes more valuable as the world gets more transactional, he says, even as the business behind it becomes less sustainable.

On what’s next: Shaw plans to take some time off and isn’t making any big decisions. People have suggested consulting, another big communications job or board seats, he says, but he doesn’t want to rush into anything.

Mary Jo has a suggestion: run PR for OpenAI, “because man, they need somebody to help.” Shaw’s characteristically dry reply: “That would be such a low-stress job.”

Related links

• Microsoft comms chief Frank Shaw to exit after nearly three decades shaping the company’s message
• Internal memos: Microsoft shakes up communications as Nadella makes a push to build in public
• Microsoft’s ‘lost decade’: Vanity Fair piece accurate but incomplete
• Frank X. Shaw: Things I’m Thinking About
• Mary Jo Foley’s GeekWire stories

Edited and produced by Curt Milton; Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell. 

Microsoft is moving its communications function out of its marketing group and into the corporate, external and legal affairs organization led by Brad Smith, its vice chair and president, according to internal emails Thursday from Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Brent Colburn, Microsoft’s VP of global public affairs, was named interim communications leader, effective next week, reporting to Smith. Colburn announced this month that he was leaving the company in mid-October. He will now stay through December and is not a candidate for the permanent role.

Frank X. Shaw, the longtime Microsoft communications chief who announced earlier this month that he would leave the company at the end of the year, will step away from his current responsibilities and serve as an advisor to Smith and Colburn during the transition, according to the memos.

Building in public: Nadella’s memo described the change in the organizational structure as a response to a shifting media environment, and said the larger plan is to make employees a bigger part of Microsoft’s public voice.

He said Microsoft needs to “find new ways to connect directly with all of our constituencies” in a media environment he called “increasingly fragmented and noisier than ever.”

“In many ways, the people closest to the work have the best opportunity to shape how Microsoft is understood,” Nadella wrote. He said he wants to help engineers, sellers, partners and others “closest to our products and customers” become “an even bigger part of how we tell our story, all connected by a shared strategy and set of principles.”

The approach Nadella described is closer to how AI labs and startups operate. OpenAI and Anthropic tend to be more fluid with their blogs and livestreams, and AI researchers and leaders are more likely to post directly and informally in their own voices.

Microsoft has been working to make more of a mark of its own in AI, building in-house models under Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI group, while Copilot trails ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in consumer adoption. In recent weeks, Meta has made a splash with its Muse AI assistant and a new device called Muse Charm, a palm-sized gadget it previewed Wednesday.

Nadella and the company’s engineering leadership have been pushing to modernize Microsoft’s communications, moving toward a more direct approach and building in public, according to a person familiar with the situation.

“We will learn, we will experiment, and we will evolve,” Nadella wrote. “There is a fundamentally new way to think about communications, and this team will be central to building it.”

Smith echoed the point, writing that Microsoft will “likely have more employees and executives acting as part of Microsoft’s public voice, including on social media.”

The timing: Shaw’s shift to an advisory role surprised some inside the company. Announcing his exit two weeks ago, he said he would be at Microsoft “through the end of the calendar year.” Microsoft said at the time that it would take “the coming months” to determine its future communications leadership.

Contacted via phone, Shaw described this as the formalization of the plan that was announced. He will still be at Microsoft through the end of the year in an advisory role.

In a statement, Microsoft said Shaw “has been a trusted counselor and leader at Microsoft for more than two decades, and we’re grateful he will continue to act as an advisor during the transition.”

Nadella thanked Shaw in his memo, saying he has “made tremendous contributions to the company and to our communications function over the last 17+ years” and has been “a great source of counsel to our leadership team and to me personally, across the company’s biggest moments.”

In his memo, Smith wrote of Shaw that he has “worked as closely with him as almost anyone” over those years, and that Shaw’s “enduring impact on Microsoft and this team will be felt for years to come. I will miss him.”

Smith said Microsoft has launched a search for a new chief communications officer that includes internal and external candidates. He will work on the selection with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, and Amy Coleman, its chief people officer.

The next chief communications officer is also expected to report to Smith, which indicates the change is permanent and not just for the interim period.

The new structure: Nadella called Smith one of the few leaders who “embody Microsoft’s voice” authentically, citing his “rare ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity, conviction, and trust.”

Smith’s organization handles Microsoft’s legal, regulatory and public policy work, including antitrust matters, litigation and government relations. Communications will now sit alongside those functions rather than with marketing and product, although both memos emphasize continued coordination between the two.

The communications leadership team will expand to include Caitlin McCabe, Carol Ann Browne and Dave Imperiale, according to Smith’s memo, citing the communications roles they play for Nadella, Smith and Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business. Kate Frischmann will also join the team, reflecting her role on the public affairs side of Smith’s organization. In his interim role, Colburn will join Numoto’s leadership team in addition to Smith’s.

Nadella wrote that Microsoft’s upcoming fall events present “a real opportunity to bring together our product story, our marketing, and our communications in new ways.”

It’s the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant’s communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of its senior leaders, is leaving at the end of the year.

Shaw, 64, said he’s not retiring, although he doesn’t have another job lined up. He plans to stop working for a while, do some of the things he hasn’t had time for, and then decide what’s next.

“I have had a ringside seat at some of the biggest leadership, technology, and business transformations that have ever taken place,” Shaw said, sharing the news of his departure (under embargo) in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “I just feel incredibly fortunate.”

He said he had been discussing his potential departure for some time with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, looking for the right moment.

Microsoft has not announced a successor for his role as chief communications officer. In a LinkedIn post, Shaw said the company will consider internal and external candidates.

A statement from Shaw’s colleagues in corporate communications credited him for his many years shaping Microsoft’s “voice and reputation with intelligence, candor and wit. His leadership and contributions to the company are too extensive to list, as is the number of journalists who have, at one point or another, used his name in vain.”

A former Marine Corps public affairs officer, Shaw has worked with all three of Microsoft’s CEOs. He started on the agency side, at Waggener Edstrom — now known as We. Communications — when Bill Gates was still running the company.

He built his reputation defending and advocating for Microsoft through some of its hardest stretches: the antitrust years, the Windows Vista backlash, the scramble to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO, and the weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman.

As the company’s top communications executive, he has also told the story of Microsoft’s reinvention under CEO Satya Nadella, from the LinkedIn and Activision Blizzard deals to an AI push that has carried Azure past $100 billion in annual revenue.

Evolving with technology: Shaw has spent much of his career closely watching the tech landscape and moving Microsoft’s voice into new channels as they emerged.

“We’re always thinking about what is the art and science of communications,” Shaw told PRWeek. “How do we reach our audiences most effectively in a changing environment?” He called the arc from print to radio and TV to social media and newsletters a “constant evolution of influence.”

He turned the corporate blog into a place where the company argued its own case, writing “Microsoft by the numbers” himself in 2010 — a stat-by-stat comparison against Apple and Google that TechCrunch dubbed “fantastic passive-aggressive.”

He and his team experimented with different and risky methods of telling the company’s story, holding mass briefings under embargo and publishing documents known as the “Book of News” in advance of its major keynotes and conferences. The prospect of a reporter having to answer to “fxs” was no doubt a factor in ensuring the news (mostly) didn’t leak.

Shaw hired Steve Clayton out of a technical role at Microsoft in London, where he had been blogging about the company unofficially out of frustration with how it was perceived, and made him chief storyteller. In the middle of the AI boom, Clayton and Shaw embraced the analog undercurrents in popular culture and launched Signal, a quarterly Microsoft print magazine for business leaders.

Clayton was VP of communications strategy by the time he left in January to become chief communications officer at Cisco, making Shaw’s planned departure the second high-profile exit from Microsoft’s comms team in a year.

Adapting to AI: In recent years, Shaw made his own team a testing ground for AI, publishing what worked and what didn’t. In a 2023 post he described using Copilot in Teams to pull story ideas out of conversations with spokespeople and anticipate coverage after interviews, and asking the AI to “poke holes in a statement we’re making on a tricky topic.”

He called it his corporal, a reference to Napoleon, who was said to bring one to meetings and ask whether his generals’ war plans made sense to him. A survey of 80 people in Microsoft’s communications and marketing organization found 84% did not want to go back to working without it.

Shaw was also known to use AI as a sounding board when a story frustrated him, offering him an objective take before he called and let a particular reporter have it.

He announced his departure Friday morning in a message to Microsoft’s communications team (reminding them he’s still there for a few months yet) and his public post on LinkedIn.

“Thank you as well to all the reporters, editors, writers, influencers and analysts who have put up with me over this time, enduring my early and late night calls, my off the record ‘no comments,’ my bad story ideas and my extended commentary on headlines and positioning,” he wrote.

“You all have incredibly hard and valuable jobs,” he added, “and while I’ve not agreed with everything said about us 😊 I appreciate you anyway.”