Gundotra

A week after one exec left Microsoft under mysterious circumstances, the company has suffered another casualty in its fight against Google - except this time the exec has defected. Business 2.0 reports that Vic Gundotra, a general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft and a 15-year veteran - who hired Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble - has agreed to join Google. He will first spend a year working on "philanthropic pursuits," according to Google, because he has a noncompete agreement with Microsoft.

At Microsoft, Gundotra's mission was outreach, leading the effort to encourage independent developers to write programs that complement Microsoft's desktop software and online services - and impede Google's forays into ad-supported web-based applications.

As a result of his work "overall, developers are much more satisfied with Microsoft than they were three or four years ago," says Greg DeMichillie, a senior analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft.