Microsoft on Tuesday confirmed that a longtime executive, Julie Larson-Green, is leaving the company. The news comes a few months after Larson-Green stepped back from her role as chief experience officer for Office productivity as she was recovering from surgery.
Larson-Green joined Microsoft in 1993, a year after the arrival of the company's current CEO, Satya Nadella. She was once seen as a potential candidate to replace former CEO Steve Ballmer, but Nadella was ultimately chosen for that task.
Larson-Green has held top roles in Microsoft's Windows and hardware groups, but most recently she was focused on Office in the age of the cloud. She was one of Microsoft's most prominent female executives. Tuesday is her last day there.
"We thank Julie for the numerous contributions she's made to Microsoft over the last 25 years, and we wish her the very best in her new endeavors," a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. ZDNet previously reported the news.
Larson-Green's role was leading "engineering and design of the Office productivity experiences that make it easy for people to access information, connect with others and accomplish tasks across all their devices," she wrote on her LinkedIn profile.
Larson-Green previously worked under another Microsoft veteran, Steven Sinofsky, until Sinofsky left his position as head of Windows in 2012. At that point she took over Windows software and hardware engineering.
Last year Larson-Green told Business Insider that she was the one who removed the Clippy virtual assistant from Office apps like Microsoft Word in 2007. "We were just ahead of our time with the technology," she said.
In May, The Information said that most of the people who had been reporting to Larson-Green will now report to company veteran Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of Office, OneDrive and SharePoint.