Peter Pathe retired from Microsoft in February 2007.

In his last position with Microsoft, Peter Pathe was corporate vice president of Microsoft Office Authoring Services. His team was responsible for InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher and Word, all part of the Microsoft Office System.

Pathe has held a number of management positions at Microsoft. Prior to his current position he was general manager in the Microsoft Research Division where he oversaw the Advanced Projects Group and MSR University Relations.

Pathe came to Microsoft in 1991 to manage the development of TrueType fonts and the TrueType font imaging system for Microsoft Windows. Today, TrueType remains the most sophisticated font imaging system anywhere, and is able to reproduce type designs on computer displays, printers, and typesetters with typographic excellence. The TrueType font set for Windows immediately became the most popular collection of typefaces in the world, and continues to define the state of the art in digital typeface engineering.

In 1993, Pathe joined Microsoft's Desktop Applications Division to lead the Microsoft Word Business Unit. While under his management, revenues for the business more than tripled to over $2 billion annually, and Microsoft Word surpassed all competitors to become the world's most popular word processing software. Pathe is credited with introducing key innovations to the product line and with early recognition of the shift from print to online documents in the workplace. In 1994, he delivered Microsoft Internet Assistant for Word, making Word the first commercial word processor capable of browsing and editing documents directly from the World Wide Web. In 1995, Word was able to support e-mail messages as a basic document type. Also in 1995, a single version of Word replaced the many individual language versions previously shipped. This achievement, along with native support of UNICODE character sets and device-independent page layout, enabled users to share e-mail and word processing documents online around the world.

In 1995, Pathe consolidated two product lines in the Microsoft Word and PowerPoint Business Unit, adding management of the presentation graphics product for Microsoft Office to his responsibilities.

Pathe holds a bachelor's degree in engineering and applied science from the California Institute of Technology. He holds a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his research in electronic publishing and user interface at the Architecture Machine Group, forerunner of the MIT Media Lab.