Exeunt from the C-suite

A nice coinage that showed up in my feed today, tho it's from an article that's a couple of years old:

'Execudus' in Redmond: Top Microsoft Execs Get Out

The quotation marks of course mean that this is a self-conscious usage. There are a couple of other instances of this term used in this way (and not, as I interpret it, as something to do with World of Warcraft); all seem to refer the same phenomenon of executives leaving Microsoft specifically. Some references don't include the quotation marks. Since I don't know WoW, I don't know how likely it is that the business-terminological mashup is inspired by the game. It's certainly understandable without any previous exposure to WoW.

The cited article is from 2011; it's possible that the term was pretty new then. A blogger for the Redmond Channel Partner site more or less suggests the newness of the term at that time:

Your editor is working on a story about Microsoft's recent executive departures (now known here as the Execudus), and this week one of the biggest names in Redmond is headed out the door.

I guess we'll have to see a similar exeunt from other companies before we can determine whether the word has legs.