Jim Allchin siad he'd retire after shipping Windows Vista, and he's now said goodbye via the Vista team blog with a post about his new life. For example:
Went to clean up the playroom so that it's organized for when the kids get home. Ended up building an application to sort the Legos using a SQL Server backend and a Windows Presentation Foundation front-end on Windows Vista. Can't decide whether the primary index of the database should be color or size of the piece.
(There's a Channel 9 video that gives a better idea of what he was like.)
With the retirement, Microsoft has also lost the (unpaid) services of one of its most influential user interface testers, Jim's Mom....
Allchin has been replaced by Steve Sinofsky, who actually joined Microsoft a year earlier -- in July 1989. He moved to the Office team in 1994 and was responsible for the development of Office 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007. It won't be too surprising if he tries to do more versions of Windows and they ship closer together.
The next scheduled version is due later this year with a Windows Server that has been developed from Server 2003. Since Vista is also based on Server 2003 code, there will be a long-planned Vista Service Pack 1 to incorporate updated code where server development continued after Vista stopped.
After that, there should be a Windows XP SP3 in early 2008, so I wouldn't really expect a Vista II before 2010-11. And I hope Steve's already decided that it will be 64-bit only, but I suspect not.
