It means that Jim Allchin is very close to retiring…
That is a sad thing in my eyes, Jim is an amazing person and I believe Windows will change considerably without him and not necessarily for the better. Jim is an executive management level person who outgeeks most tech level people and gives geeks a voice at the highest levels of management at Microsoft. I think his leaving a serious position of control inside of MSFT will hurt. Obviously Jim deserves to retire and relax as he has been doing amazing things for a long long time (ever hear of Vines?[1]).
Good luck to Jim but where can he have more fun than what he is doing now?
joe
[1] I take that back as a lot of people working on Windows now, maybe even a majority probably haven’t heard of Vines.
Have heard of Vines, kind of. CBE in 96. Best NOS of it’s day thanks to Jim and the team in Westboro. StreetTalk was awsome!
Best of luck to Jim in his future endeavors!
You talking about Banyan Vines?
Sheesh, that’s going back quite a ways, if you are. Never used it though, was too busy learning Fortran 77 on VAX/VMS/MVS (never got the hang of what exactly that was, and I didn’t really care).
Windows has been going down the downward spiral after Valentine left for Amazon due. IMHO, with Allchin leaving, there are only a few Execs left (not including Gates and Ballmer) who are accepted in the industry as great forward thinkers: Bach and Allard. I would guess neither of which would want to take on Allchin’s role. Not that MS could suffer losing them out of their respective divisions anyway. The other MS Execs are either new to MS or don’t have their name out there. Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec and look through their Execs. How many of the names do you recognize? Not many…
MS should have bought Google when they had the chance. They’ve lost a lot of talent and in the process are falling behind.
The new Allchin, Kevin Johnson, was a sales dude kinda like Ballmer was before becoming president, then CEO. Time will tell how Johnson pans out and where MS will go from here.
My money is on Google.