Microsoft has detailed its much-rumored reorganization plan, with Steve Ballmer describing the strategy as “One Microsoft” and forming four main areas: operating systems, devices & studios, applications & services, and cloud & enterprise. The new teams – which will be led, respectively, by Terry Myerson, Julie Larson-Green, Qi Lu, and Satya Nadella – will take a more over-arching approach to engineering Microsoft products, rather than seeing things like Xbox gaming, entertainment, and Windows all silo’d off into separate divisions. Ballmer says that the company will adopt a more direct communication strategy with him as CEO, following the five tenets of being nimble, communicative, collaborative, decisive, and motivated.
“Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most” Ballmer wrote in an email to all staff sent today. He also confirmed that Kurt DelBene will be leaving Microsoft, that Craig Mundie will be solely occupied in “a special project for me through the end of this calendar year”, and that Rick Rashid will shift away from Microsoft Research and instead take on “driving core OS innovation in our operating systems group.”
The reorganization basically means that Windows and Windows Phone have been merged into a single group, the Operating Systems Engineering Group, which will also handle the software that runs on Xbox, back-end systems, and core-cloud services for OSes. Hardware, meanwhile, will be tackled by Julie Larson-Green’s Devices and Studios Engineering Group, covering design, engineering, and supply chain.
Larson-Green’s team will also tackle the various studios experiences, such as games, music, and video.
“We are going to focus on completely reinventing experiences like creating or viewing a creative document and what it means to communicate socially at home or in meetings at work. We are going to immerse people in deep entertainment experiences that let them have serious fun in ways so intense and delightful that they will blur the line between reality and fantasy. And as we develop these new experiences, we will also support our developers with the simplest ways to develop apps or cloud services and integrate with our products” Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
According to Ballmer, working in divided ways is no longer a possibility. “Each major initiative will have a champion who will be a direct report to me or one of my direct reports” the Microsoft CEO writes. “The champion will organize to drive a cross-company team for success, but my whole staff will have commitment to the initiative’s success.”
The full organizational structures and the new divisions are detailed below, and you can find the updated titles and other information at Microsoft’s senior leaders page.
Operating Systems Engineering Group. Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console, to mobile device, to PC, to back-end systems. The core cloud services for the operating system will be in this group.
Devices and Studios Engineering Group. Julie Larson-Green will lead this group and will have all hardware development and supply chain from the smallest to the largest devices we build. Julie will also take responsibility for our studios experiences including all games, music, video and other entertainment.
Applications and Services Engineering Group. Qi Lu will lead broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories.
Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. Satya Nadella will lead development of our back-end technologies like datacenter, database and our specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools. He will lead datacenter development, construction and operation.
Dynamics. Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run Dynamics as is, but his product leaders will dotted line report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will dotted line report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will dotted line report to the COO group.
Advanced Strategy and Research Group. Eric Rudder will lead Research, Trustworthy Computing, teams focused on the intersection of technology and policy, and will drive our cross-company looks at key new technology trends.
Marketing Group. Tami Reller will lead all marketing with the field relationship as is today. Mark Penn will take a broad view of marketing strategy and will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions.
COO. Kevin Turner will continue leading our worldwide sales, field marketing, services, support, and stores as well as IT, licensing and commercial operations.
Business Development and Evangelism Group. Tony Bates will focus on key partnerships especially our innovation partners (OEMs, silicon vendors, key developers, Yahoo, Nokia, etc.) and our broad work on evangelism and developer outreach. DPE, Corporate Strategy and the business development efforts formerly in the BGs will become part of this new group. OEM will remain in SMSG with Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Tony who will work closely with Nick Parker on key OEM relationships.
Finance Group. Amy Hood will centralize all product group finance organizations. SMSG finance, which is geographically diffuse, will report to Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Amy.
Legal Group. Brad Smith will continue as General Counsel with responsibility for law and corporate affairs and will map his team to the new organization.
HR Group. Lisa Brummel will lead Human Resources and map her team to the new organization.
Microsoft reorganization official: OS teams merge, Hardware unified is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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