Microsoft loses Office 365 man

Dave Thompson, who headed up Redmond's Office 365 business, is retiring from the company later this year afterwards 21 years at Microsoft.

Cloud-based service in October last year

Microsoft shoved its productivity suite of apps into a cloud-based service in October last year. The arrival of the Office 365 beta was, actually, a brand overhaul of Microsoft's clunkily-named Business Productivity Online Suite.

"While that time, he's been responsible for delivering transformative products like Windows NT, Exchange, and BPOS, and we thank him for the significant contributions he's made to Microsoft and the industry."

In recent months the Steve Ballmer-run company lost the boss of its $15bn server and tools business unit, Bob Muglia, its entertainment and devices chief Robbie Bach and biz division boss Stephen Elop.

Earlier this week, Microsoft won a restraining order from a Washington state court, afterwards its ex global government biz general manager Matt Miszewski popped up in a very similar role at cloud computing rival Salesforce.com.

The company has clearly been playing hardball with its internal biz strategy by desperately examining "business processes that have remained untouched for years". And together Microsoft continues to sell plenty of shrink-wrapped packets of its Windows operating system, too.

The last count

In fact at the last count, the company claimed it had shifted 300m Windows 7 licences. Sadly, that figure evidently didn't impress enough, given the company's recent divorce from so many of its top flight execs. ®