Bill Hilf

Who is Bill Hilf?

Bill Hilf is the Vice President of Hewlett-Packard's Cloud Product Management organization. Previously, Hilf was General Manager of product management for Microsoft's cloud computing platform, Windows Azure. Before Azure, he was General Manager of the Technical Computing group at Microsoft, which focuses on High Performance Computing, Parallel Computing, and cloud computing. He was formerly head of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy at Microsoft, and the creator of Microsoft's strategy and work with open-source projects. Hilf previously worked at IBM where he led their Linux technical strategy.

Hilf made a number of controversial statements in his Open Source role at Microsoft, claiming that "The Free Software movement is dead... Linux doesn't exist in 2007. Even Linus has a job today...", implying that free software is equivalent to freeware. Hilf's role at the time focused heavily on business and enterprise users, as noted in his statement about OSS and philosophy, "Most CIOs don't really want to make decisions based on philosophy. There is no discussion that 'all software must be free because I believe in the movement.' So, it is to the betterment of the open source community that it has matured". Albeit a controversial issue, during his time in this role, Hilf was recognized as one of the 25 most influential people at Microsoft.