Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell is leaving Microsoft at the end of the year, the company said this afternoon. Peter Klein, now CFO for the Microsoft Business Division, has been named the new CFO for the company.

Liddell is "exploring a number of opportunities," said Mark Murray, Microsoft spokesman. Liddell has been at the company for almost five years. This past year, Liddell oversaw cost cutting that eliminated $3 billion in expenses and 5,800 jobs.

Microsoft stock has been trading near a 52-week high of late, closing at $29.91 per share today. The stock has dropped slightly in after hours trading, since the news was announced, to $29.75 per share.

"I think he’s done a fine job," said McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Sid Parakh of Liddell's tenure at Microsoft. "Just last year, he’s kind of tried to address some of the long standing investor concerns. Clearly from a cost perspective, what they’ve done over the last year, reduced $3B in cost, that’s fairly commendable."

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in a statement:

“Chris and his finance team have accomplished a great deal over the past four and a half years. The team is deep and strong, and has an excellent record of building value for our shareholders. Peter brings great finance and operations expertise and a deep understanding of the company, and I am looking forward to a smooth transition that continues our commitment to cost containment and finance excellence.”

Liddell, 51, previously served as CFO at International Paper Co., and CEO of Carter Holt Harvey, a company based in New Zealand, where Liddell is from.

Klein, 47, has been at Microsoft since 2002 and has also served as CFO of the company's Server and Tools business. He previously worked at McCaw Cellular, Orca Bay Capital and startups including HomeGrocer.com. Klein has a bachelor's degree from Yale and a M.B.A. from the University of Washington.

Liddell will stay through the end of the year to help with the transition.

In a video making its way virally around The Twitters (another Mr. Chan-ism from my dad), Microsoft employees broke out into the electric slide to the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" at a Microsoft retail store.

Check it out below, and then compare to Oprah's flash mob at her 24th anniversary street party, in which tens of thousands also danced to "I Gotta Feeling," performed live by the band itself.

It's not truly a peas and carrots comparison in that Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is not actually at the Mission Viejo store holding a gold microphone.

There's a poll below for you to weigh in on the better dance team.

New York Times editorial columnist Nicholas Kristof has called for a boycott of Microsoft's search engine Bing for censoring search results in China.

Kristof said Friday in his blog that a search of politically sensitive terms like Tiananmen -- in simplified Chinese characters that are used in mainland China -- returns sanitized results. The same holds true for terms like the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong.

The results are not sanitized when searches are conducted in traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Kristof called the censorship "craven kowtowing" and wrote:

"Now Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing. In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus."

I first saw a posting about the boycott on TechFlash.

Microsoft responded Friday evening:

"... our image search is not functioning properly for queries entered using Simplified Chinese characters outside of the PRC. We have identified the bug and are at work on the fix. We expect to have this done before the Thanksgiving holiday."

In the meantime, I will be installing the simplified and traditional Chinese language support on my laptop.

The Financial Times is reporting that Microsoft has been talking to News Corps about paying for content if the company de-indexes its news sites from Google. Microsoft has been working on building up Bing as a viable search competitor to Google.

News Corps, the company run by Rupert Murdoch, owns the Wall Street Journal and many newspapers around the world.

The report said Microsoft is also in talks with other online publishers to do the same. If true, Microsoft could represent an alternative for newspaper publishers, who have long complained that Google uses their content for free and refuses to share the revenue generated from it.

Microsoft is not commenting on the story.

Microsoft held its annual shareholder meeting this morning at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue to a sunnier outlook overall, except for shareholder questions about the popularity of Macs and iPhones.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer looked backward and forward in his address:

"There's no doubt that fiscal year 2009 was one of the most challenging we've ever face. The economic reset had a major impact on companies around the globe and Microsoft was certainly no exception," he said.

While "we saw revenue decline for the first time in the company's history, fiscal year 2009 was actually a good year in terms of execution and fiscal management," pointing to the launch of Bing, Zune HD and other products. Windows 7 came out in October, which was after fiscal year 2010 began.

"Today we're certainly more efficient, definitely more agile and definitely more competitive than ever." The company beat analyst estimates in the first quarter of 2010 that ended Sept. 30.

And in the long, long term: "When we meet back here in 10 more years, we will look back and say, 'Wow, wasn't technology really primitive in 2009? Computers didn't recognize our speech, they didn't recognize our gestures .. we didn't have instantaneous access to the world's information, we still used pen and paper.' ... Microsoft is investing to be at the forefront of these changes."

About 400 shareholders, mostly retirees, attended the meeting.

Some highlights from the shareholder Q&A session:

One man said Microsoft shares had done well for him. But his kids are now in college and they all have Macs. They think Microsoft is stodgy and the Apple ads make Microsoft look like a "buffoon."

Ballmer's response: "The truth of the matter is we do quite well, even among college students. Do we have an opportunity for improvement? We do. Some of that is marketing, some of that is phase of life. Ninety-six times out of 100, people choose a PC with Windows. ... Mac has picked up a couple of tenths of a percent of market share last year. But every tenths of a percent MATTERS."

Another shareholder said Microsoft needs a stronger mobile product to compete with Apple's iPhone and Google's Android.

Ballmer's response: "Good question. We have greater market share to Google Android. ... Our objective is to have a leading position among these competitors. We have just recently launched a new generation of Windows phones with new software. We are going to keep making investments, we have a lot of oppportunity. We're on the right strategy, which is to focus on building the software for the phones, not (building) the phones."

Ken Hutcherson, the vocal pastor from Redmond who opposes gay-marriage rights, spoke at length supporting a shareholder proposal that would require the company to disclose who it makes charitable donations to. He wanted to know specifically which gay-rights nonprofits the company gives to. Microsoft made large donations to campaigns to approve Ref. 71 this year, extending domestic-partner benefits. The proposal failed to win shareholder approval.

Bill Gates made nary a peep at the one-hour meeting, even though he was seated on stage with Ballmer, Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell and General Counsel Brad Smith.

• All nine directors were re-elected. The seat vacated by James Cash's retirement was not immediately filled.
• Deloitte & Touche was selected as Microsoft's independent auditor.
• Shareholders approved changing the articles of incorporation to allow major shareholders to call a special meeting.
• Shareholders also approved an advisory vote for new executive compensation, also known as say on pay. This refers to shareholders having a say on pay. (This is not like my dad's philosophy of say on pay, which he calls, "You say, you pay." If you get to say where we're eating dinner, you get to pay.)

One other shareholder initiative failed:

• A statement of support for universal health care proposed by the AFL-CIO, received four percent of the yes votes.

The meeting was a rather spartan affair, with only Ballmer's occasionally shouting words to liven it up. There wasn't even a Powerpoint to spice things up. Shareholders got free coffee and a breakfast buffet.

Starbucks, another local shop, has put Tony Bennett on stage during their shareholder meeting and piped in Paul McCartney by satellite. The company usually sends everyone home with goodie bags.

Earlier this week, Microsoft gave everyone a free touchscreen laptop to everyone at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. (Full disclosure: To maintain our independence as members of the press, The Seattle Times newsroom has a strict gift-acceptance policy: We accept no work-connected gifts or gratuities of significant value. Gifts of insignificant value – key chains, pens, calendars, etc. – may be kept if it is impractical or awkward to return them.)

Here are my earlier livetweets from the meeting, and here is an earlier story we ran Wednesday with some interesting thoughts from CFO Chris Liddell.

I will be livetweeting the Microsoft shareholders meeting at 8 a.m. today. They are meeting at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue. You can follow me in the right corner of the Pri0 blog or at www.twitter.com/sharonpianchan.

LOS ANGELES -- If you want to try out Office 2010, the beta is now available by download for anyone. You can get it here. Office Web Apps, Microsoft's online competitor to Google, will also be available for anyone to preview who downloads the 2010 beta.

Office Mobile 2010 is also available in beta, which you can get by going to the Marketplace for Mobile if you have a Windows phone.

An interesting new feature for Office is a Social Connector to Outlook that can pull in status updates from social networks. LinkedIn was the partner announced today, which will connect early next year. No word on Facebook or Twitter.

Also, for you IT administrators out there, betas are also available for Sharepoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010. Office Web Apps on-premise is also available to beta test if a company wants to install it on its own servers.

The final version is supposed to be available in, not surprisingly, 2010.

"People may have historically thought of Office as desktop or PC thing," said Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of marketing for Office. "With 2010 we are really focused on giving that productivity experience across the PC and browser."

LOS ANGELES -- Four months after releasing Silverlight 3, Microsoft is making Silverlight 4 available for beta testing. You can find it here.

Silverlight is multimedia user experience software that competes with Adobe Flash. For instance, Silverlight is being used by to stream the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games online, as well as te Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.

New features include:

• The ability to create experiences in non-browser places, like on the desktop.


• Web cam and microphone support.


• New animation features, like the ability to break a video screen into jigsaw puzzle pieces.


• More manipulation of photos. Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform, demonstrated this by warping a photo of himself that he then posted to Twitter as his profile pic.