By Daisuke Wakabayashi
Microsoft Corp. picked two well-respected technical minds to fill the void from founder Bill Gates' pending departure in two years, but it also identified a next tier of leaders charged with reinventing the software giant to compete against younger, agile rivals.
Grabbing headlines in Thursday's announcements were Ray Ozzie, 50, who assumes the company's top technical mantle as chief software architect, and Craig Mundie, 56, who takes over some of Gates' role as long-term visionary.
But Microsoft also tapped a next tier of technical talent in J Allard, Steven Sinofsky and Bob Muglia -- executives in their 30s and 40s -- to play a larger role in shaping the company's future business and technology strategy.
Analysts said all three have won the respect of Microsoft's rank-and-file programmers with deep technical knowledge and an understanding that technology improvements cannot come at the expense of delays to new products, a problem that has plagued the company's mainstay Windows division.
"They have really good technical minds and really good experiences about what kind of decisions you have to make in order to ship a product," said Rob Horwitz, an analyst at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft.
"Those are the guys with their feet on the ground and not as much pie in the sky."
An ability to ship new products in a timely manner seems all the more important in light of investor perceptions that Microsoft has been outmaneuvered by aggressive and more agile competitors like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
"Microsoft is at a crucial inflection point," said Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox. "The technologists are important for the company's future.
The decision by Gates to step back from Microsoft in two years follows longtime Windows guru Jim Allchin's plan to retire after Windows Vista ships in 2007, representing a changing of the guard at the Redmond, Washington-based company.
"The world has had a tendency to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on me. In reality, Microsoft has always had an unbelievable strong depth and breadth of technical talent," Gates said at a news conference on Thursday.
WHO'S NEXT
Sinofsky, 40, earned his stripes as the head of product development for the Microsoft Office business software team, gaining a reputation as a tough taskmaster with an ability to meet targeted release dates.
Earlier this year, he took on the role of leading the team of developers creating the next version of Windows after Vista. Sinofsky's responsibilities include integrating the operating system with a set of Windows Live Web-based services.
Allard, 37, gained prominence with a note he sent to Microsoft leaders about the looming importance of the Internet, which became the basis for the company's change of strategy to embrace the Internet in the mid 1990s.
An avid video game player, Allard now oversees the engineering and design of the Xbox game console. He pushed Microsoft into online gaming well before rivals Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co. Ltd.
Muglia, 46, has the longest track record of the three at Microsoft, having joined the company in 1988. As the senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, Muglia needs to keep outside developers happy with its tools and technology professionals using its servers.
All three executives were already considered stars in the company, but analysts said granting them more say over strategy and keeping them happy and motivated is a smart move.
"You have to keep these people motivated with new challenges," said Horwitz. "All three of them have been at Microsoft long enough that they could be on a 100-foot yacht in the Mediterranean sipping down Martinis all day."
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.
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