Rick LaPlante, who was largely responsible for Microsoft's strategic embrace of Application Lifecycle Management and the "super-sizing" of the IDE into VSTS, is leaving Microsoft and turning over the keys to Andrew Kass. Kass is most recently SVP of Product Development at an Atlanta company called S1 that "delivers customer interaction software for financial and payment services."

Kass has also held positions with Oracle, PeopleSoft and Living.com. As far as I can tell, he's basically an expert in CRM development. He got some notice for writing a caching mechanism for ATG Dynamo, presumably in Java.

I don't know Kass, so it's hard to say how much of a change this represents, but certainly it seems like a significant shakeup.