I doubt it. The post talked about how there will be 'transitioning' for three months. That doesn't happen in case there are politics serious enough for her to step down.
I don't think it's that nefarious. She came from an enterprise background and was made CEO to emphasize the importance of enterprise sales to Ubuntu.
Shuttleworth says as much in this blog post from 2009:
"As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organisational leadership, which I see as essential for Canonical over the next five years. We are being welcomed as a partner and supplier to ever-larger businesses, and I want to make sure we are a robust answer to their needs."http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/295
When meeting with Fortune 500 customers, it makes sense to have the CEO participate in negotiations rather than the same person with a more nebulous VP title.
Or, just maybe because she's a smart, sophisticated, charismatic leader, with engineering degrees in both computer science and mathematics, and business management degrees from Oxford and Vanderbilt?
Jane has been one of the most powerful, honest, decisive, and passionate person in the open source technology world for the last 14 years.
In an industry fraught with executive impropriety, her integrity has set the golden standard by which I'll forever measure any other CEO that I ever work for, or hope to become.
Mark and Jane together have long provided the yin and yang balance that's so fundamental to the indelible passion that is Canonical and Ubuntu.
She will be missed, and she will go on to do even more incredible things.
Since Canonical receives a huge backlash whenever "Mir" or "Unity" are mentioned, I wanted to tell you that Unity was absolutely fantastic as a desktop. I have tried and used many platforms and in many ways (except only hi-dpi support) Unity was the best desktop on the market across all operating systems.
I also hope that you and Mark and the rest of the team understand that the constant hate was by a vocal minority rather than the majority. Most people were happy with Unity because it just worked and could be extremely powerful at the same time.
And I don't know if you've heard this enough, so thank you for creating such a great piece of software that made Linux on the desktop accessible to hundreds of thousands of people.
I gather from the original statement by Mark Shuttleworth that the decision to cancel further development of Unity version 8 was a business decision based on not continuing development of the phone/mobile converged UI.
I suspect (and hope) that Canonical just ignored the 'vocal minority' and carried on! Otherwise no-one would ever try anything new.
I'm just wondering slightly how much of a Chandler the Unity 8 project was...
I'd assume their are some behind the scenes politics that will leak in the coming weeks.