The revolving door that is the Windows Presidents office.

Steven Sinofsky unexpectedly left his seat as President of Windows Division at Microsoft on November 12. In 2006, CEO Steve Balmer appointed five presidents for five divisions of Microsoft. Sinfsky was president of Windows and Windows Live.

Sinofsky is just one of several Microsoft Executives that have left in the past four years, many of whom are still in the running to potentially be the heir to the CEO. The list goes as follows;

1. Jeff Raikes.

He was with Microsoft for 27 years. With extensive experience designing Office programs he was promoted to VP of Microsoft Office, and retired as president of the Information Worker business line. He is now the president of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

2. J. Allard

J is best known for his work with XBox, Zune and Kin. He helped drive the path of Microsoft toward the cloud. He left shortly after Microsoft sided with the tablet friendly Windows 8 instead of his own two-screen tablet.

3. Robbie Bach

Robbie was head of the business end of things. When he left in 2010 he was the president of Entertainment and Devises.

4. Stephen Elop

he left to help Nokia as he is now their current CEO. He has the least amount of Microsoft under his belt as he was only there from 2008 until 2010.

5. Ray Ozzie

Ray left suddenly for unknown reasons. Could be the slow progress of cloud computing. He developed several products that were handed over to Sinofsky's team, and then killed. I would be mad to.

6. Bob Muglia

Muglia was president of the Server and Tools Division. He notoriously did not get along with Sinofsky, and with his foundation in hardware, it proved a rough transition to a cloud based environment.

7. Andy Lees

Not exactly fired in 2011, Lees was President of the Windows Phone Division. He was sidelined in 2011 but made a comeback in 2012 when brokering an agreement with Barnes and Noble that lead to the joint Nook Tablet venture. This upped him to Corporate Vice President.

8. Paul Maritz

Paul was with Microsoft for 14 years managing Windows 95, NT, and Internet Explorer. He left and became lead of rival VMware, and later EMC. A definite contender to replace Ballmer.