Jeffrey Snover

Jeffrey Snover, a fellow at the Harvard Law School, is the chief architect of Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and the inventor of PowerShell, an object-based scripting language and command line shell for system administration and automation.

After dropping out of the University of New Hampshire in 1982, he worked as architect and development manager for Tivoli NetView at Tivoli Software (IBM), and as a consulting engineer and development manager at DEC. He joined joined Microsoft in 1999, where he invented Microsoft Management Console and PowerShell. He became a Technical Fellow as well as the chief architect for PowerShell, Windows Server, and the Azure Infrastructure and Management group, which includes Azure Stack, System Center and Operations Management Suite. He retired from Google in 2026. Snover held eight patents prior to joining Microsoft, and has registered over 30 patents since.

At Microsoft Snover joined Microsoft in 1999 as divisional architect for the Management and Services Division, providing technical direction for Microsoft's management technologies and products. The prototype was implemented in the C# programming language.

The Monad manifesto faced fierce resistance from the rest of Microsoft and caused Snover's demotion. Snover describes the 2002–2006 time period as painful, frustrating, and embarrassing. In 2019 he was the AI architect for the Microsoft 365 substrate and became the CTO for Modern Workforce Transformation.

After Microsoft In 2022 he left Microsoft and became an SRE Google Distinguished Engineer. He retired from Google in January 2026.