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That means even more visibility for Jeff Raikes, prez of Microsoft Business Division, Robbie Bach president of entertainment and services, and Kevin Johnson , president of platform products and services.
"There seems to be a move to give the three top guys more hands on responsibilities after July 1," said one knowledgeable source.
That all makes sense, given that Jim Allchin has signaled his intention to leave once Vista hits the streets. (A tedious debate on whether that will happen officially in October or November raged on most of last week.)
Raikes, after 25 years with the company, shows no signs of slowing down. He's added SharePoint Server, Content Management Server, Exchange Server, and the whole of Microsoft Business Solutions to his portfolio over not so long a stretch. He already owned the Office juggernaut, and parlayed that into a group of servers and services byond the desktop productivity apps.
All eyes now are on who will replace Doug Burgum, a Raikes direct report, who is the senior vp in charge of MBS and its ERP game plan.
Also look for co-CTO Ray Ozzie to play a role in making sure these three groups actually know what the others are doing in hopes of reducing duplicated efforts and in bolstering the "integrated innovation" we keep hearing about.
Sources said the changes ripple from last fall's internal reorg which named the three business presidents, and positioned Johnson (aka KJ) as Allchin's successor.
The internal name for that restructuring was "Alchemy." (Could it be that Microsoft is so code-namy happy that it has run out of words? It's used Alchemy before.
Secondly, the last posting was not meant as a slam to Microsoft's revamped beta process. It was more a realization that those of us covering the company devote far too much time tracking the minutia of what Microsoft (and others) call pre-alpha, alpha, pre-beta, beta, community technical process releases, insert-your-own-catch-phrase-here.
In the final analysis, who cares? Software development has always been an iterative process both in open-source nirvana and the commercial world.
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