Craig Mundie, the new chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, has been not so much an evangelist as an ambassador, a civilized spokesman for a company that's often viewed as an imperialist state in the geopolitics of technology.

He plays the role effectively even in hostile territory, as he did when making the keynote address in 2001 to an overwhelmingly anti-Microsoft crowd at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in San Diego.

Now Mundie will need to navigate the new corporate politics of a Microsoft without Bill Gates at its center. Mundie acknowledges that authority in the company will become more distributed. But don't be fooled by the diplomatic nature. Mundie says Gates "built a company in his own image," and the fiercely competitive atmosphere he nurtured won't soften. "That culture will carry forward for a long period of time," says Mundie, who worked alongside Gates managing Microsoft strategy and policy for eight years.

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