Microsoft said Raikes will stay on another nine months to help with the transition.
"Year in and year out he managed to deliver growth, " Helm says of Raikes.
Raikes was straightforward about the need for groups like Gates to make better use of data.
FORBES: Jeff Raikes On The Challenges And Successes Of The Gates Foundation
He knows he may never run all of Microsoft, yet Raikes harbors no hidden ambition to run another company.
He co-founded the Raikes Foundation and is an active member of the United Way of King County.
Raikes, who was president of the business division, was one of the most influential figures at Microsoft.
Among Microsoft's 55, 000 employees, Raikes stands alone in his ability to challenge Gates' brilliance and Ballmer's bluster.
Raikes, 49, joined Microsoft in 1981, and was instrumental in building Microsoft's business division into the Redmond, Wash.
Gates at first had balked at a makeover before the Longhorn system would be ready, but Raikes talked him into it.
"It was hard to believe what people were saying was true, " Raikes says.
Raikes worried that the project, run by his counterpart James Allchin and already delayed once, was meandering out of control.
Raikes rattled off trouble spots, exposed inconsistencies among engineering groups, demanded responses and said what others had kept to themselves.
Some insiders call Raikes' division the dead cash cow, a mordant joke for a guy who grew up around cattle.
Raikes figures one-third of his business' growth will come from selling more copies of Office, and the rest from new features.
Raikes's past philanthropic efforts have been focused on education and children's issues.
But Raikes sees it as a moveable beast:One-third of users haven't upgraded since 1997, a rich target if Microsoft can find new uses to excite them.
That was one thread of the conversation its leader, Jeff Raikes, had last week at the Global Philanthropy Forum, a conference in Redwood City, Calif.
FORBES: Jeff Raikes On The Challenges And Successes Of The Gates Foundation
Elizabeth Raikes is shortly to stand down as chief executive of Torbay Council, so is experienced in social care and in liaising with the health service.
Raikes, who was president of the business division, was one of the most influential figures at Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ).
Raikes and Gates, who will step down from his day-to-day role as Microsoft's chief software architect in July, are so close they have vacation homes near one another.
Homespun, plainspoken and a Microsoft lifer--on Oct. 9 he put in his 8, 000th day at the company he joined in 1981--Raikes is the stable counterbalance to the intense duo.
Rather than finding a replacement for Raikes within Microsoft, Ballmer turned to an outsider, Juniper Networks Chief Operating Officer Stephen Elop, to take on the high-profile job that Raikes defined.
The announcement comes just a week after Microsoft tapped Stephen Elop, chief operating officer of Juniper Networks, to replace company veteran Jeff Raikes in the high-profile job of business division president.
Raikes built the business by tying new products such as Microsoft SharePoint to hits, such as Microsoft's Office suite of productivity applications, says Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft.
Raikes, who took over as head of the Gates Foundation two and a half years ago after almost three decades at Microsoft ( MSFT), was proud of the accomplishments made by the foundation.
FORBES: Jeff Raikes On The Challenges And Successes Of The Gates Foundation
Bill Gates isn't yet officially gone from Microsoft, but the reign of Jeff Raikes, a little-known but key veteran executive, came to a close Thursday when the software giant announced that he is retiring.
Earlier this year, when a retreat for a hundred Microsoft managers turned into a giddy pep rally for the much-anticipated Longhorn, a dramatic Windows overhaul set for 2005 or later, Raikes played the spoiler.
Raikes acknowledged that the culture of the foundation did not have as much curiosity and questioning as he would like and said that intellectual dialogue was one of four cultural priorities on his to-do list.
FORBES: Jeff Raikes On The Challenges And Successes Of The Gates Foundation
Born in Nebraska and raised on a 1, 500-acre cattle ranch just outside Omaha, Raikes has a natural ability to wait out the shouting match, to say what no one else will even when it means challenging the formidable Ballmer.
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