Yusuf Mehdi’s ‘last season’ at Microsoft: Long-time executive plans to leave after last year
Yusuf Mehdi, one of Microsoft’s best-known and longest-serving business leaders, whose tenure has spanned 35 years from Windows 3.1 to Copilot, plans to leave the company after one year — his “last season,” as he called it in an interview.
Mehdi, 59, is Microsoft’s EVP and chief consumer marketing officer, overseeing product marketing for Windows, Surface, Copilot, Microsoft 365 consumer, Edge, and the Bing search engine. He announced his plan on Thursday, saying he intends to work full time this coming fiscal year, ensure succession plans are in place, before leaving the company that has been, as he put it, “the highlight of my life’s work.”
He compared it to choosing a ship date for purchasing a product, something he had extensive experience with during his time at the company. You put it on the calendar, and work to achieve it.
“There will be time later to reflect and celebrate, but for now, it’s moving at full speed in our work,” Mehdi wrote in an internal email to his team Thursday afternoon.
After that? He’s not sure, but he’s not saying he’s retired. He said that he is feeling young and energetic, he is thinking about something, but he stressed that he has not made any plans.
Mehdi said he has been working closely with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Chief Marketing Officer Takeshi Numoto in the transformation process. Microsoft did not name a successor, and said it was too early to determine what leadership would look like after his departure.
His priorities for the next year will include positioning Windows for the agency era, integrating Microsoft Copilot as a seamless experience across work and personal life, and growing the Microsoft 365 consumer business as it nears 100 million subscribers.
His work on Windows, in particular, is “a little poetic,” he said, since that’s where he started.
Mehdi’s work at Microsoft has touched nearly every major consumer product the company has shipped. He started as an intern in 1991, in his mid-20s, after working for two years at Reuters, where he worked on computer-based products for the foreign exchange trading business.
He joined Microsoft full-time in 1992 after earning his MBA from the University of Washington, with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton.
After his initial work on the launch of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Mehdi went on to help launch and market Internet Explorer during the browser wars. He spent more than a decade running Microsoft’s Internet services and search businesses, helping build Bing and playing a key role in the company’s search and advertising partnership with Yahoo.
In 2011, he moved to the Xbox division, where he helped launch the Xbox One and built an NFL partnership that sidelined Surface tablets. He later oversaw the rollout of Windows 10 to more than 1 billion devices, and assumed responsibility for the Windows and Surface businesses after Panos Panay’s departure in 2023.
That same year, he was promoted to his current role on Microsoft’s senior leadership team, becoming the public face of the company’s consumer AI push, from the launch of the AI-powered Bing search engine to Microsoft Copilot marketing.
Mehdi plans to stay on until the end of Microsoft’s next fiscal year, June 30, 2027.
