Alex Kipman, a longtime Microsoft executive, is leaving the company after 21 years amid numerous misconduct allegations. insider reports. Allegations include inappropriately touching female employees and watching what a witness described as “VR porn” at work.
Many in the gaming world may recognize Kipman for the Xbox motion sensor accessory Kinect, on which he guided development until its debut in 2009. Microsoft touted the peripheral for the Xbox 360 (and eventually the Xbox One) at launch as the next big thing in gaming, but the Kinect was officially put out to pasture in 2017 after Microsoft failed to achieve the critical and commercial success that Microsoft no doubt intended for it.
Kipman later took on a similar role in developing the HoloLens, a pair of smart mixed-reality glasses similar to Kinect could not prevail to a large extent.
Behind the scenes of all this technological wizardry, Kipman is said to have encouraged one difficult environment for the people who work alongside him. A former Microsoft executive told insider that he witnessed Kipman rubbing a woman’s shoulders. When she tried to stop him, Kipman continued anyway, although she looked, as the executive put it, “deeply uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable” is also the word another Microsoft employee used to describe the VR porn incident. In May, insider reported that when the company’s mixed reality team was experimenting with a prototype one evening in 2015, Kipman donned a VR headset to test it out. The video he chose showed an “overtly sexualized pillow fight” that could be viewed by everyone in the room via a monitor that mirrored the peripheral’s display.
Working with Kipman reportedly got so bad that over 25 employees contributed to a document compiling similarly negative interactions with the intention of sending it to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Managers even warned others about leaving women alone with Kipman, according to three sources.
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insider previously detailed Kipman’s indecent behavior in a May report on Microsoft’s “golden boys,” a group of corporate leaders who have contributed to a toxic culture of harassment and abuse at the giant tech company. At this time, Microsoft has neither confirmed nor denied the charges against Kipman, and internal emails sent to Microsoft employees have been reviewed by Microsoft insider in relation to Kipman’s resignation, failing to mention the events leading up to his departure.
Speak with my boxa Microsoft spokesman would say only that organizational changes have been made to its mixed reality team and that Kipman will leave the company after a two-month transition period to “pursue other interests.”
