How many people will it take to fill Gates' shoes?

It's not that Bill Gates has an inflated sense of his own importance. But anyone who thought there'd be a single successor for the great man would be gravely mistaken, says Mary-Jo Foley.

When Microsoft hired Ray Ozzie in 2005, Ozzie was one of three chief technology officers. In 2006 Microsoft's then-chief software architect, Bill Gates, passed the torch to Ozzie.

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But Ozzie is not Gates' sole replacement. Gates' chief software architect role is split officially between Ozzie and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer.

In a new video interview posted to Microsoft's Channel 9 website on 23 June, Gates adds a third group to the list of those who will be filling his shoes after he leaves Microsoft as a full-time employee this month.

Gates told Channel 9's Charles Torre that Microsoft's group of Technical Fellows also will be helping to fill the technology-leadership void that his departure will create.

So it seemingly takes 24 people - Ozzie, Mundie and the 22 Microsoft Technical Fellows - to fill Gates' tech shoes.

Gates told Torre that Microsoft's community of Technical Fellows are the "real experts". He said his visibility has resulted in the fellows being overshadowed. His departure will create a new "opportunity for people to see how important their work is", Gates said.

It would be interesting to hear more publicly from the typically silent group of Tech Fellows. A few have been more outspoken than others, including Windows guru Mark Russinovich and the father of C#, Anders Hejlsberg.

Here are a few of the people I'd love to get to interview on that list. Among them:

Dave Cutler The guy who is considered the father of VMS, Windows NT and 64-bit operating systems at Microsoft. He allegedly is part of the All-Star Team working on Microsoft's Live Mesh platform, formerly known as the Windows Live Core effort.

David DeWitt The most recently minted Tech Fellow, working in Microsoft's Data and Storage Platform Division. DeWitt's new role is creating and leading the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab.

Gary Flake The former head of Yahoo! Research Labs who is the founder and director of Live Labs, a combo of Microsoft's research and Windows Live organisations. Flake is responsible for "setting the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts," according to Microsoft.

John Shewchuk According to Microsoft, Shewchuck "leads the Project Zurich architecture and strategy teams, which are focused on extending Microsoft's .NET application development technologies to the internet 'cloud'."

Burton Smith Smith is charged with expanding the company's efforts in parallel and high-performance computing.

Mike Toutonghi Toutonghi currently leads the Advertising Platform Architecture Team, "focusing on architectural design and integration of Microsoft's platform assets, technologies and efforts". He is a long-time, on-again/off-again Softie, who first joined the company in 1992 to work on the Windows 95 kernel.

Do you think these 24 people can fill Gates' shoes? Or do you believe, hope and/or pray that Ozzie will now emerge from the shadows where he's been hiding for the past three years to become the public technology face of Microsoft?

Original article: How many people does it take to fill Bill Gates' shoes? from ZDNet UK