After 20 years with the company Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie is going to retire in 2014 after he turns 65.

As a run-up he's turning his current roll over to chief technical strategy officer Eric Rudder to play senior advisor to CEO Steve Ballmer and work on "key strategic projects." He's also supposed to continue to work with policy makers and governments according to an internal memo retrieved by AllThingsD.

Rudder gets Microsoft's R&D arm, its Internet and software security group and other projects that reported to Mundie.

Mundie was one of the two men Bill Gates picked to take over his technical responsibilities when he left the company in 2008 to work on his charitable foundation. The other was Ray Ozzie, who abandoned his position as chief software architect two years ago to found his own start-up.

Mundie, in comparison, was supposed to spot emerging trends.

The Seattle Times thinks "Ballmer is putting in place a new team to start planning the next upgrade to help Microsoft compete in a market that has shifted to mobile devices and computing over the Internet."

In mid-November - even before the ostensibly mobile Windows 8 proved a non-starter - the company announced that Windows chief Steven Sinofsky was leaving, reportedly thrown out by Ballmer for being fractious.