Microsoft Exec Expected to Announce He’ll Retire : Technology: Company neither confirms nor denies the reports concerning Executive Vice President Mike Maples.

A key Microsoft Inc. executive in the management tier just below the software giant’s chairman and co-founder, Bill Gates, is expected to announce today that he will retire, a computer industry trade publication reported.

Mike Maples, 52, an executive vice president and member of the three-person office of the president, is expected to stay on long enough at Microsoft to help break in a successor or successors, according to Computer Reseller News in an article for publication today.

Maples, who joined Microsoft in 1988 after 23 years at International Business Machines, was in charge of worldwide product development. He shares the office of the president with Steven A. Ballmer, who is in charge of worldwide sales and marketing, and Robert Herbold, who oversees operations service and support.

The office of the president reports directly to Gates.

“Mike Maples is extremely well respected both in the industry and inside Microsoft,” said company spokewoman Pam Edstrom, who declined to confirm or deny the report of his retirement.

As to published reports that Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft would reorganize its top management structure in the wake of Maples’ departure, Edstrom said that the office of the president has worked well and she would anticipate no fundamental changes if Maples were to leave.

“Mike Maples joined Microsoft in 1988,” she said. “The company has grown substantially since then, and the amount of (his) responsibility and the number of people reporting to him has grown.”

If Maples were retiring, she said, it might make sense to fill the open spot with more than one person but without changing the character of the office of the president.

Maples’ departure would come at a time when Microsoft is about to unroll an on-line service, Microsoft Network, to compete with such rivals as Prodigy and CompuServe as a link to the vaunted information highway.

Microsoft also is battling an antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department, which is trying to break up its proposed $2-billion acquisition of financial software publisher Intuit Inc.