Microsoft VP quits, Sanjay Parthasarathy elevated

SEATTLE: Microsoft Corporation said on Wednesday that Paul Maritz, vice president of its platform strategy and developer group and a 14-year veteran of the software giant, is retiring. He is the latest high-level executive to leave the company. Maritz, who coordinated work on the core technologies at the heart of the Windows operating system, had left for personal reasons but would serve as a consultant on strategic and business issues, Microsoft said.

Yuval Neeman would continue as vice president of the developer division while Maritz's lieutenant, Sanjay Parthasarathy, was named to a business development and developer evangelist role reporting directly to Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, Microsoft said.

The move is the latest in a string of high-level departures that have hit Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft over the past year. In May, the company saw its chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold quit after a year-long leave of absence. That followed the departure in January of chief financial officer Greg Maffei.

"I understand Paul's decision - for personal reasons and after nearly 14 years at Microsoft - to do some of the other things in his life that he'd like to do," Ballmer said in a statement. Maritz's exit came less than six months after he was tapped to head the developer group and speed the rollout of the company's .NET initiative to rework its software for the Internet.

Joining Microsoft in 1986 after five years at Intel Corporation, Maritz led the company's early networking initiatives and later was responsible for much work on Windows and Office, the suite of business software, including the word processor and Excel spreadsheet.

Maritz was an early and ardent supporter of Windows, which in its initial versions in the 1980s was looked upon with scorn and scepticism in the computer industry and even within the company itself.

Seeing the potential of Windows 3.1, Microsoft's first successful version of the software released in 1990, Maritz was instrumental in convincing his boss, company co-founder and chairman Bill Gates, to drop a project with IBM called OS/2 that could have usurped Windows' popularity.

Although the move angered IBM and was risky for Microsoft, which back then took a backseat to Big Blue, it allowed the company to devote more resources to Windows, which eventually became the standard for personal computers.

But Maritz was also behind one of the company's most embarrassing moments, which centered on Netscape Communications, a company that caught Microsoft unawares when it made the first popular software for browsing the Internet.

In a now infamous internal e-mail, Maritz wrote that Microsoft should include its own browser with Windows in order to "cut off Netscape's air supply", a line that was a prime exhibit in the government's case that Microsoft abused its Windows monopoly to illegally crush its rivals.

In June, a federal judge ruled that Microsoft should be broken in two to prevent further such abuses. Microsoft has maintained it did nothing illegal and is appealing the case.

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.