Gates, Ozzie Road Show; Ellison Takes In Sox

He also recalls Gates saying five or six years ago that he couldn't imagine anyone being the Chairman of Microsoft at age 50. Hmmm. Conspiracy theorists or others with too much time on their hands, might speculate that Bill will hand off one of his titles—Chief Software Architect—to golden boy Ray Ozzie.

The two are slated to opine on software-as-a-service next week in San Fran. Gates once called Ozzie, then with Lotus, the "greatest programmer on the planet."

Since Gates' Microsoft bought up Ozzie's Groove Networks last year, the two execs seem to be having a fine ol' time, although even some company insiders wonder how Microsoft will rationalize the often-overlapping technology of Microsoft SharePoint and Groove.

"Somebody's gotta kill some baby," said one former insider.

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The reverbs from the recent Redmond reorg continued last week as Microsoft named Bob Muglia to succeed Eric Rudder as senior vice prez of Server and Tools. Rudder had already been named a Gates direct report in the last reorg in which Kevin Johnson was named heir apparent to Jim Allchin. Johnson and Allchin are now co-presidents of the platform, products and services group.

Also Sanjay Parthasarathy of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team will now report to Johnson. Simon Witts and the Enterprise and Partner Group will continue to report both to the server and tools business and to COO Kevin Turner.

Phew.

LARRY GETS HIS WHITE SOX ON

Another set of Sox (White this time) won the World Series in a brilliant display of ingenuity, competitive fire, and capitalizing on good breaks. And, native Chicagoan, Oracle CEO Larry Elllison was at games one and two, sources say. (The Chicago White Sox swept the Houston Astros in four.)