Nielsen left Microsoft in 2000 to become CEO of startup CrossGain, the brainchild of another former, long-term Microsoft exec, Adam Bosworth. Following a legal tête-à-tête with their former employer over the timeline of their non-compete agreements as well as over their embrace of the Java language versus Microsoft’s .NET, CrossGain was acquired, personnel and all, by BEA Systems in late 2001. That sale made Nielsen BEA’s chief marketing officer and executive vice president of engineering. But while CrossGain’s product eventually evolved to become BEA WebLogic Workshop, a key development tool for BEA’s application server products, neither Bosworth nor Nielsen stayed long. Bosworth left in 2004 to become Google’s vice president of engineering where he remains.
Nielsen, meanwhile, left BEA last year, and then joined Oracle earlier this summer as senior vice president of marketing and global sales. However, like former Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei, who announced last week that he is leaving as Oracle’s CFO after only four months, Nielsen is now also moving on.