If Windows XP were an album, Jim Allchin would be on the cover, a middle-age rock star jamming a triumphant guitar solo encore that brings down the house.
Allchin, head of Microsoft's platforms division and part of Chairman Bill Gates' inner circle, is the maestro behind the computer program dubbed XP — the flashiest, most powerful and perhaps the most controversial product in Microsoft's 26-year history.
"This is the finest operating system in the world," Allchin declared in August, on the day his team finished XP after an all-night bout of testing.
XP goes on sale Thursday with a $250 million global marketing blitz. It represents Microsoft's biggest push yet to transform the personal computer into a machine for playing music and videos, for storing and sharing photos and for communicating with friends and family.
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