A 35-year Microsoft career nears its end

'Final season' for a Microsoft veteran: Yusuf Mehdi, one of Microsoft's best-known and longest-serving executives, plans to leave next year after a 35-year career that touched Internet Explorer, Bing, Xbox, Windows, Copilot, and a lot more. The EVP and consumer CMO told us he'll work at full intensity through June 2027 before stepping away. Read more.

• Mehdi’s exit plan dovetails with a broader reshaping of Microsoft's leadership under Satya Nadella, who is dismantling its traditional structure in favor of smaller, flatter teams as the company pushes to compete in the AI era, Business Insider reports.

• If you’re feeling nostalgic for the Microsoft of old, GeekWire’s Todd Bishop took a trip down memory lane in Redmond — a courtyard full of Microsoft product plaques — while snapping a photo for our Expedia retrospective this week. See the video on LinkedIn. 

Want to hear about Seattle's economic challenges? Go to Bellevue, apparently. Business leaders gathered across the lake to dissect what's holding Seattle back, including taxes, political uncertainty, and a strained relationship with large employers. The silver lining: many of the city's fundamentals are still strong, public safety is improving, and the FIFA World Cup offers a chance to prove Seattle can still put on a show.

Quote of the event: “I don’t think I was invited here back in 2017 or ’18 — when Amazon jobs were falling out of the sky in downtown Seattle and we had 79 cranes in the air — to talk about the good times,” joked panelist Jon Scholes, the longtime Downtown Seattle Association leader. Read more.

Allen fund leadership shakeup: Dr. Lynda Stuart is stepping down as the first CEO of the Fund for Science and Technology, the $3.1 billion foundation created under Paul Allen's instructions. The change comes less than a year after FFST's public launch and follows broader shifts across the Allen philanthropic ecosystem. Read more.

Premier name placement for a Seattle-area startup: Temporal, the Bellevue-based workflow orchestration company valued at $5 billion, is becoming the front-of-shirt sponsor of Crystal Palace Football Club, a longstanding English Premier League soccer team. Read more.

Teens win big at international science fair: Lakshmi Agrawal, a senior at Interlake High School, won $75,000 for a low-cost filter designed to help save Puget Sound’s salmon. Anusha Arora, a sophomore who also attends Interlake, won $50,000 for an AI-powered device that expands access to music therapy. Read more.

Remembering a friend: Anthony Bolante, an award-winning photojournalist with the Puget Sound Business Journal, died this week at age 58. A fixture on assignment throughout the Seattle region's business and tech community, Bolante was a Hawaii native, military veteran, husband and father — and a beloved, longtime friend of GeekWire. Read more in the PSBJ.

Hot Links:

• Starbucks scrapped its AI inventory‑counting tool across North America after accuracy issues forced stores back to manual tracking. (Reuters)

• Microsoft’s GitHub, once poised to dominate AI‑assisted coding, is losing ground as outages, leadership churn, and a slow Azure migration frustrate developers and open the door for faster‑moving rivals like Cursor and Claude Code. (CNBC)

• Starlink, with its large satellite manufacturing operations in Redmond, has emerged as the financial engine behind SpaceX and, by extension, the best hope for Elon Musk’s vision of making humanity interplanetary. (Wall Street Journal)

• A ranking of World Cup host cities puts Seattle at No. 3 behind Vancouver, B.C., and Toronto, and No. 1 in the U.S. based on accessibility, cost, atmosphere and more. (Action Network)