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Microsoft boss waves goodbye to biz division wonder kid

Stephen Elop elopes to Nokia

Stephen Elop’s tenure at Microsoft proved to be short and sweet. He arrived in time for the Windows Vista death march, followed by the happy-clappy launch of Windows 7, and then – as a last hurrah – the retail release of Office 2010 in June.

As we reported earlier, Elop has now taken on the role of CEO at Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer described Elop, who only joined the software vendor as its business division director in January 2008, as “a good steward of the brand and business”.

Ballmer said nothing about an immediate replacement for Elop, which suggests that Nokia’s nabbing of Shouty Steve’s golden boy may have come as something of a surprise at Redmond.

In the meantime Elop’s technical leadership team will fill the void. Ballmer singled out Chris Capossela, Kurt DelBene, Amy Hood and Kirill Tatarinov as the people who will report directly to him in the interim.

Elop has skipped around the tech industry a lot in the past five years.

He was Macromedia's president and CEO before it was subsequently bought in 2005 by Adobe Systems where, for a short time, he held the role of global sales head. Elop then jumped ship for a job at Juniper Networks where he quickly became the company's COO before heading to Redmond two and half years ago.®

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