Lervik Resigns from Microsoft/Fast (Updated)

See this CMS Watch story which says that John Lervik has resigned from Microsoft/Fast. A Norwegian newspaper story on the resignation is here (with bad machine translation here). Stephen Arnold of Beyond Search covers the story here in a colorful post that delves into Norwegian folklore.

Since I’ve blogged extensively about the issues at Fast previously, I won’t restate everything here, but instead provide a link to my previous posts.

While speculation abounds about why Lervik resigned (e.g., links to the accounting troubles and restatement of financials, or links to last October’s police raid on Fast’s headquarters), I believe that Occam’s Razor suggests the following analysis:

• Microsoft clearly knew about the serious accounting issues prior to buying Fast
• Microsoft bought Fast anyway despite those issues (and at an inexplicable valuation when considering them)
• You would think that if Microsoft had issues with Lervik, they would have released him either at the time of the acquisition or the police raids (i.e., they had two good opportunities to do so and didn’t).
• Lervik’s resignation came almost one year to the day since the acquisition

While I don’t claim to have any special information and have no idea what actually happened, this line of reasoning leads you to conclude that Lervik didn’t like it at Microsoft and had to work through a one-year retention agreement before resigining.

Fast CTO Bjørn Olstad is said to be taking over Lervik’s position, further suggesting that the action wasn’t Microsoft trying to cut ties with Fast’s previous management team.