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 more year — his “final season,” as he called it in an interview.
Mehdi, 59, is Microsoft’s EVP and consumer chief marketing officer, overseeing product marketing for Windows, Surface, Copilot, Microsoft 365 consumer, Edge, and Bing search engine. He announced his plan Thursday, saying he intends to work at full intensity through the next fiscal year, ensuring succession plans are in place, before stepping away from the company that has been, as he put it, “the canvas of my life’s work.”
He compared it to picking a ship date for a product, something he’s had a lot of experience with during his time at the company. You put it on the calendar, and you work toward it.
“There will be time later to reflect and celebrate, but for now, it’s full speed ahead on our mission,” Mehdi wrote in an internal email to his team on Thursday afternoon.
After that? He’s not sure, but he’s not calling it retirement. He said he still feels young and energetic, and he has some ideas in mind, but he emphasized that he hasn’t made any plans.
Mehdi said he has been working closely with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Chief Marketing Officer Takeshi Numoto on the transition plan. Microsoft has not named a successor, and he said it’s too early to determine what the leadership structure will look like after his departure.
His priorities over the next year will include positioning Windows for the agentic era, unifying Microsoft Copilot as a seamless experience across work and personal lives, and scaling the Microsoft 365 consumer business as it approaches 100 million subscriptions.
His work on Windows, in particular, is “a little poetic,” he said, since that’s where he started.
Mehdi’s career 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 a two-year stint 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, adding to a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton.
After his early 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 online services and search businesses, helping build Bing and playing a central 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 forged the NFL partnership that put Surface tablets on the sidelines. He later oversaw the rollout of Windows 10 to more than 1 billion devices, and took on 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 the marketing of Microsoft Copilot.
Mehdi plans to stay through the end of Microsoft’s next fiscal year, June 30, 2027.
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