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Microsoft Chairman John Thompson also noted in an interview in May that the board was considering whether there were changes to be made to the sales and partner organizations to more quickly increase cloud revenue.

The company declined to say Thursday whether Thompson’s comments were in any way related to Turner’s departure.

At Microsoft, Turner was known for red-meat speeches at partner and sales events that amped up the rivalry with competitors like Oracle Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and International Business Machines Corp. and for an equally fierce competitive streak that saw him personally intercede to woo back customers flirting with non-Microsoft products.

A habit of peppering his speech with folksy maxims delivered in an Oklahoma accent, such as ‘the biggest room in our house is the room for improvement,” belied a tough manner and a refusal to accept shortcomings, that along with some of the rigid processes he put in place had both fans and detractors among employees.

Turner came to Microsoft from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. with a brief to instill more process and discipline in the company’s operations and salesforce, which at the time didn’t even have quarterly notes.

Turner introduced procedures such as a “conditions of satisfaction” document that details what Microsoft will provide each client. A screw-up required a “correction of errors” in which employees autopsied the mistake and laid out steps to ensure it didn’t happen again. He also created standard scorecards with 30 categories to measure each subsidiary’s performance.

Microsoft was up 0.3 per cent to US$51.54 at 10:10 a.m. in New York. The shares were down 7.4 per cent this year through Wednesday.

Bloomberg News