Notable Microsoft managers leave the company

A number of Microsoft veterans are reportedly leaving the Redmond giant as we’re nearing the fall season. According to Mary-Jo Foley from ZDNet, three of the following five Microsoft employees are going into retirement while two of them have yet to announce their next career move.

• Bill Laing, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President is going into retirement after joining the company in 1999 and spending many years working on Windows Server.
• Rick Rashid, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft’s Applications and Services Group is also now officially retired. The former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University founded Microsoft Research in 2013 which he oversaw until 2013.
• Chuck Thacker, a pioneer computer designed and Turing award recipient is also going into retirement. He joined Microsoft in 1997 to work on the company’s new Research Lab in Cambridge, UK but left two years later to join Microsoft’s new Tablet-PC group in the US. Later on, he also worked with the Xbox/Kinect teams and Microsoft Research in the Silicon Valley.
• Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President of Mergers & Acquisitions Strategy and Business Development for the Cloud and Enterprise Business will leave Microsoft on September 15 according to Foley. He joined the company in in 1996 to quickly become Corporate Vice President of Windows Azure Marketing. He “can’t wait to finalize my next phase” according to his LinkedIn profile.
• Dave Campbell,  Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise unit is the last veteran to leave the company though his next gig is still unclear. The exec joined the company in 1994 and spent many years working on SQL.

While these high-profile departures could appear like bad news for Redmond, these kind of events are not exactly unusual for any company. According to Foley, we’ve just passed Microsoft’s annual review time and this often the period that Microsoft employees choose to leave the company.