Microsoft marketing officer Yu Sasamoto resigns

Microsoft confirmed the news but declined to offer further details on Sasamoto's next move.

The company statement said, "Presently, Microsoft’s consumer and online division has Mark Britt as the general manager and Haresh Khoobchandani as the chief marketing officer in Asia-Pacific."

During an interview earlier this year, in which Sasamoto shared his career course with Campaign, he said that Microsoft had approached him in 2006 when the brand was very vigorous about building the search business. At the time, Sasamoto was working at MTV in Japan as COO and then took over the CEO role.

After he joined as GM of Microsoft's online service group which included search, MSN and Windows Live, his role later evolved into the current consumer and online function, based in Singapore.