Model Management: Microsoft's conventional wisdom

Is Microsoft becoming a 'normal' company after all these years? Changes at the top suggest so. The Seattle-based company has named Richard E Belluzzo as its new president and chief operating officer. Steve Ballmer, CEO, has given up the post of president to make room, and current COO Bob Herbold is retiring.

Beluzzo has only been with Microsoft for 18 months, after previously being CEO of Silicon Graphics. Before that he had been at Hewlett-Packard and had been tipped for the top spot there before Carly Fiorina was brought in from Lucent. He is the first outsider to take a significant management position with Microsoft for nearly two decades. He will continue his previous responsibilities at the firm's personal services and devices division.

The changes come at a time when Microsoft is facing the greatest uncertainties in its history in the form of considerable business challenges as well as various legal problems.

On the desktop, although its flagship Windows operating system business is suffering from the global slowdown in PC sales, it is close to launching new versions of the best-selling Windows and Office products for this market. These two trends probably cancel each other out.

Meanwhile, the company is trying to muscle its way into new business areas with the Xbox games console and a deal to sell television set-top boxes in alliance with AT&T. It also recently launched a number of internet security products aimed at helping protect corporate ebusiness systems. (Microsoft has lately been a much-publicised victim of such attacks.)

In short, Microsoft is in the process of metamorphosing from a software company to one much more focused on consumer and corporate services.

The changes in top management reflect this - one of Beluzzo's previous and present responsibilities will be the Xbox. The reshuffle leaves a confused organisational chart at Microsoft - just like most companies undergoing serious change - but it has been welcomed by most outside observers. The promotion of an outsider is seen as showing that Microsoft is consciously avoiding any "inbreeding".

Most strikingly of all, the name of Bill Gates - now Microsoft's chairman and 'chief software architect' wasn't mentioned once. Now is that normal?