Slip Slidin' Away...

Watch your step... the slipping and sliding continues. Now Office 2007 will also wait until the year it is named after to see the light of day in any meaningful way. And a shakeup that looks more like a reflexive shudder than deliberate planning with a real vision is underway. The Windows group is undergoing a serious reorg... again, according to Dan Farber. Offfice is really, really dead this time writes Steve Gillmor. Even Ed Bott, who I've come to count on for pretty accurate prognostication seems a little blindsided by this week's tumultuous events.

What a mess. The guy who, as the saying goes, kept the trains running over at Office is now tossed into the fray in the Windows Group. Is there such a shortage of talent that a company of Microsoft's size has to rob one of it's big revenue divisions to get the other back on track? Is Gillmor right? Have I been denial?

Oh me, oh my. 

UPDATE: Todd Bishop at seattlepi.com reports that this reorg has been in the works for months and is "unrelated" to this week's events. Oh really? Look, I get that there's no overnight palace coup and purge going on in Redmond and that decisions like this are not made suddenly. But seriously - who is in charge of public messaging up there? This has been one of the worst displays of entropic communications I've ever witnessed, especially from a company that is usually pretty solid with their message.