Steven Sinofsky, the no-nonsense head of Windows and Windows Live Engineering, has been promoted to president at Microsoft. With Sinosky’s hands further up the reins, I expect that the company will not soon repeat mistakes that delayed Windows Vista, and ship future versions of Windows on a more predictable schedule.

Sinofsky has been the company’ s public face of Windows 7, which is rumored to be nearing its release to manufacturing, giving PC manufacturers time to prep for the OS’s official debut on October 22nd.

He will be the fifth Microsoft president, joining Robbie Bach from the company’s Entertainment Division; Business Division head Steven Elop; Bob Muglia, from the company’s Server and Tools business unit; and Online Service chief Qi Lu.

That executive line up represents a shift to a second generation of leadership at the company, and includes some new blood. Elop joined Microsoft from Juniper Networks, and Lu comes from Yahoo. Only Bach and Muglia are veteran executives; Sinofsky worked his way up from engineer, and was the former head of Microsoft Office development. He headed up Office 2007–which, like Windows 7, was a rare high-profile Microsoft software release that hit its major milestones without any high-profile delays or glitches.

 
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