Steeve Sinofsky, a former chief of Windows, entered into a "non-disparage" agreement with Microsoft. Under the non-disparage agreement, he was prohibited from making any criticism of his former employer. In addition, the former executive, who was also in line to receive US$10 million, was prohibited to join the company's rivals, such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, before 2014.

Furthermore, the agreement did not allow him to poach Microsoft staff nor persuade customers to leave with him. Also, he was prohibited from encouraging companies - including Acer, Asus, HP, HTC, Dell, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, LG, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba - to end their relationship with the company.

Sinofsky was ousted from the company last November. Since then the former Microsoft employee began teaching at Harvard University. He even started a blog, titled Learning by Shipping, which talked about his management observations.

Sinofsky was considered to be a close confidante of Bill Gates and worked closely on the Window 8. However, it may seem his efforts could have been in vain as sales of the OS were not very good. The company's revenue was US$19.9 billion, which was below what analysts expected. There was also an unexpected "inventory adjustment" amounting to US$900 million for the surplus and weakly-performing Surface RT tablet.