Stephen Elop is getting a lot of airtime of late – he did a presentation at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Fran and he is the man behind the recently lauded Microsoft “2019 video”. Who is he? A big cheese, that’s who. He’s President of the Microsoft Business Division. For those who don’t know the org structure of Microsoft too well, that means his team is responsible for products such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint, the Dynamics business and more. He reports to Steve Ballmer and joined Microsoft just over a yea ago from Juniper Networks.

I’ve been hugely impressed by Elop since he joined. He’s a good speaker who is both funny and self deprecating when he talks. He often talks of Microsoft as “the evil empire from the Pacific North West” before explaining why that judgement of Microsoft was wrong. For a guy who’s clearly not Generation Y, he seems as connected to Gen Y as many younger folks in Microsoft and understands the power of the web and how looking externally really is a good thing. In short, he’s a breath of fresh air.

And now he’s on Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see how actively he uses the service as his initial posts and who he follows indicate his joining coincided with his Web 2.0 presentation.

There are other Microsoft execs on Twitter but they’re no too active. I’m hopeful Stephen will be and may lead his peers to do the same.

Welcome Stephen.