Let’s cover his qualifications first.  Sinofsky has degrees from both Cornell and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  He held the appointment of visiting scholar at Harvard Business School in 1998, as well, and somehow it took two people to cover his old position another time he moved around within Microsoft.

Also, Steve Ballmer said in a statement, "Steven Sinofsky has demonstrated the ability to lead large teams that deliver great products.  The work he and the team have done in getting ready to ship Windows 7 really defines how to develop and ship world-class software.  He is a perfect fit to lead the Windows group."

So after leading the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, Sinofsky will become responsible for Windows, Windows Live, and Internet Explorer in terms of both engineering and marketing.

You can imagine that members of the Google Chrome OS team might be feeling a little intimidated right now; whether Microsoft meant to or not, it’s definitely upped the ante in the operating system arms race.

Not long before Microsoft’s public relations team officially distributed the news of the reorganization, the Valleywag tech gossip site received a copy of PSD co-president Kevin Johnson’s internal memo and summed up Johnson’s take on MSN and Live:

Though there has not yet been a mass of Microsofties being escorted to the parking lot by security, a couple of MSN higher-ups, David Cole and Michael Rawding, are in the process of leaving MSN.

Also, former MSN Information Services engineering leader Yusuf Mehdi has the new title of senior vice-president and chief advertising strategist. His former position included overseeing MSN’s entry into the search engine world.

MSN Search trails Google and Yahoo in terms of overall search market share.

Steven Sinofsky, senior vice-president, will lead the Windows and Windows Live group. He has been the head of the Office team, where he gained a reputation for running a “tight ship,” as blogger Dare Obasanjo noted:

Office 2007 has slipped a bit with its release date, being moved into 2007 to coincide with the consumer release of the Vista operating system. Volume licensing customers will receive the newest versions of Vista and Office in late 2006 though, Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor reported.

The reorg comes on the heels of Microsoft pushing Vista’s consumer release into 2007. Did that drive the formation of Microsoft’s new eight-headed beast? Todd Bishop blogged how he was told the Vista slip and the big reorg are not connected:

Bishop also recounted his conversation with a former Microsoft product manager who affirmed the same observation made by Obasanjo, that Sinofsky runs a tight ship whose projects were never “late or untidy.”

With Vista running about five years behind schedule, Sinofsky sounds like the person to keep Microsoft’s future Windows efforts on track. Maybe a return to a more regular OS release schedule will help Microsoft’s revenue stream and kick the company’s moribund stock price out of its doldrums too.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.