Microsoft's Raikes To Retire -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft's Raikes To Retire

Jeff Raikes will leave Microsoft next September after 28 years with the company.

By Barbara Darrow
01/09/2008

Jeff Raikes, one of Microsoft's top executives, will retire next year, the company said Thursday afternoon.

Raikes, who is president of the Microsoft Business Division -- aka the juggernaut behind Office -- joined Microsoft from Apple Computer in 1981. He, after chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, is probably the company's most publicly prominent executive.

Stephen Elop, formerly COO of Juniper Networks, will take Raikes' spot after a nine-month transition.

Raikes will be officially gone as of September 2008, according to this company post.

This is huge news for Microsoft where Raikes was respected for running an organization that garnered a huge percentage of the company's profits. Office, unlike Windows, was known for shipping pretty much on time, even if it sacrificed features.

Raikes also extended the "Office" franchise beyond desktop productivity applications, adding the SharePoint portal and collaboration capabilities, content management and other heretofore server-oriented technologies to the mix.

When speculation as to Gates' successor flared up, there was a contingent at Microsoft who felt Raikes might be the guy. Instead, Steve Ballmer became CEO and Ray Ozzie succeeded Gates as chief software architect.

Just this week, Raikes presided over the news of Microsoft's billion-dollar-buyout of Fast Search & Transfer, a company that could bolster Microsoft's enterprise search talents.

He also drove the company's very public unified communications push.

About the Author

Barbara Darrow is Industry Editor for Redmond Developer News, Redmond magazine and Redmond Channel Partner. She has covered technology and business issues for 20 years.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.