Microsoft’s Maples Will Step Down Company Will Expand Its Board Of Top Executives Following Executive Vice President’s Retirement

Mike Maples, whose 23 years of IBM experience helped Microsoft Corp. grow huge, will leave the software company this summer, paving the way for its first top-level job shuffling since 1992.

The 52-year-old executive vice president of worldwide products has been a senior manager at Microsoft for seven years and watched its annual sales multiply from $600 million to $5 billion.

Maples said Monday he’d decided a year ago to retire and that he and chief executive Bill Gates had since been devising a transition plan.

“My first grandkid is due in July and Microsoft is not a place for grandfathers,” joked Maples in a telephone news conference from company headquarters in Redmond, Wash. “It seemed like an appropriate time to try something else.”

He will continue as an adviser to the company.

With his departure, Microsoft’s products group will merge with its advanced technologies group, which recently has also turned out products. Microsoft’s office of the president - its top executive board comprised of Gates, Maples and two other executives - will gain three new faces.

Paul Maritz will become group vice president of Microsoft’s platforms group, which includes its operating systems that run basic functions of a PC. Nathan Mhyrvold and Pete Higgins will become group vice presidents in charge of applications and content, products that perform specific functions like word processing and games.

In the office of the president, they will join Gates, the company’s chairman, chief executive officer and president; Steve Ballmer, executive vice president for sales and support; and Robert Herbold, executive vice president and chief operating officer.

The announcement had little apparent influence on Microsoft’s stock price, which rose 50 cents a share to $81.25 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The changes come as Microsoft verges on its largest product launch ever as part of a broad expansion of product strategy. They also come as the company faces intense federal antitrust scrutiny over its dominant position in the software business, which has created a good deal of uncertainty over how Microsoft will evolve in the years ahead.

Microsoft’s core products are MS-DOS and Windows, which form the foundation software for most personal computers. This August, Microsoft will begin selling a new version of Windows, hoping to expand the base of 60 million PCs on which it is used.

It also has a number of initiatives aimed at encouraging more use of PCs by businesses and consumers, including an on-line service and two-way TV software.

Maples joined Microsoft in 1988 after 23 years at International Business Machines Corp., where he’d worked on both large and small computer systems.

“He came out of an environment that had a sense of the computer industry in its entire scope rather than just the PC industry. He also brought a sense of what they had to do to relate to very large companies,” said Amy Wohl, a computer industry consultant and newsletter publisher in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. “Those were two things Microsoft needed desperately to find out about.”

He began as vice president of application products, which perform specific functions like word processing. In 1992 he was put in charge of all products as executive vice president.

“I will personally miss Mike’s contributions greatly,” Gates said in a statement. “We have all learned from his wisdom, organizational savvy and maturity.”

Inside Microsoft and in the computer industry, Maples has been viewed as an uncle-like mentor at a company where the chairman has not reached 40 and the average employee is younger than 30.

Though he said there is a role for older people in technology firms, Maples noted he works 60-to-70-hour weeks and, after seven years of living in the Seattle area, hasn’t even traveled around Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.

“High technology as an industry moves at a very fast pace,” Maples said. “We are reinventing technology frequently and that requires that we reinvent the company and the way we do things frequently. Now, whether that has a toll on people, I was really talking about me.”

Maples said he won’t decide until early next year what other things he will take on besides his advisory role with Microsoft.