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Avie Tevanian, Apple's software guru, has been promoted to chief software technology officer, while Bertrand Serlet has been given the job of senior vice president of software engineering, notes CRN.

Tevanian crossed over to Apple with CEO Steve Jobs at the time of Apple's NeXT acquisition. He was previously senior vice president of software engineering, and has been credited with much of the direction of the OS X project, itself derived from NeXT's OS. Tevanian's new role will involve guidance of Cupertino's software technology directions.

Serlet is another NeXT alumnus, hailing from way back in 1989. He's also a an ex-Xerox PARCer, the research lab renowned for conceptualizing the GUI which the Mac became famous for. Serlet will direct Apple's Software Engineering group, reporting directly to Jobs, and will assume responsibility for OS engineering.

"This will be a seamless handoff," Jobs said in a statement about the software executive promotions. "Panther, the next major release of Mac OS X, is in great shape, and everything is on track to ship it later this year, making this a good time to let Avie return to a more hands-on technical role and to promote Bertrand to lead our entire OS software engineering team."

Analysis: As the article notes, Apple has been pumping out a huge volume of new or upgraded software this year, of which Panther is only one part. It's really been a distinct shift from the 'early' part of Jobs' stewardship; for the first few years, the focus was on hardware - shifting boxes to rake in the cash.

Now the focus is different; software drives the hardware. OS X needed a powerful machine to make full use of it; it's got it in the G5 and - to a lesser extent - in XServe. iTunes drives Apple music dollars, whether through the iTMS or iPod. FCP has a shut-down lock on the Mac DV market; OS X has 7 million users and is growing fast; and the Darwin and X11 folds are developing growing support.

A hybrid hardware/software company - with more software coming for Windows as well? Yes.