After five years as chief financial officer (CFO) and 16 years total at Microsoft, John Connors is resigning to join venture capital firm Ignition Partners. Microsoft has not yet named a replacement nor given an effective date for his resignation.

After taking over from Greg Maffei as CFO in Dec. 1999, Connors oversaw Microsoft’s transition from a fast-growing company whose stock price and profits increased dramatically every year to a slower-growing business that nonetheless generates massive amounts of cash. Although Microsoft's stock price remains well below the all-time high reached in late 1999, the company's cash and short-term investments increased from US$17.8 billion to US$64.4 billion during Connor’s tenure as CFO.

During the same period, Connors helped steer Microsoft through a number of difficult episodes and significant changes in operations that had an effect on the company's finances, including the following:

• The company's first-ever earnings warning in Dec. 2000
• A change to volume licensing programs in 2002 that resulted in a significant but temporary increase in unearned revenue
• The summer 2002 division of Microsoft into seven business units, each with its own chief financial officer and profit and loss responsibility
• Write-downs from investments—mostly made before Connors's tenure—totaling more than US$9 billion (although the company more than made up for these losses with gains on other investments)
• Legal settlements in 2003 and 2004 that sapped more than US$4 billion from earnings
• Establishment of a regular dividend payment plus a one-time dividend payout in Dec. 2004 of US$3 per share (a total of US$32 billion)
• Changes to employee stock-based compensation, including a summer 2003 transition from stock options to stock grants, a plan to let employees sell "underwater" options that was implemented in late 2003, and a Dec. 2004 repricing of options and grants to account for the one-time dividend.

Most recently, in spring 2004, Connors worked with CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives to instill new cost-control measures in the face of slowing revenue growth.

Connors said he would begin work at Ignition (which is based in Bellevue, WA, adjacent to Microsoft’s Redmond location) in Apr. 2005. He joins several other former Microsoft executives at Ignition, including founding partners Jon Anderson (who worked on volume licensing programs and finance-related issues), John Ludwig (who was the vice president of MSN business development), Cameron Myhrvold (who oversaw strategic relationships with telecommunications companies and developer evangelism), Jonathan Roberts (who worked on Windows CE), Brad Silverberg (who was an early leader of the Windows and Internet Explorer business units), and Rich Tong (who headed up marketing for Office and BackOffice).

Ignition Partners is at www.ignitionpartners.com.