In a sweeping corporate reorganization to focus on the company'sshift from a software provider to a products and services business, MicrosoftCEO Steve Ballmer has announced changes to his executive team to support a newstructure that divides the company into four divisions.
[BACKGROUND: Ballmerunveils broad Microsoft reorganization
SECURITY: Microsoft:Windows 8, Internet Explorer, Office, Visual Studio, Lync are all vulnerable]
The new groups are Operating Systems Engineering, Devicesand Studios Engineering, Applications and Services Engineering and Cloud andEnterprise Engineering.
Heading up these groups are:
- Executive Vice President of Devices and Studios Julie Larson-Green (formerCorporate Vice President of Windows Engineering);
- ExecutiveVice President of Operating Systems Terry Myerson (former corporate vicepresident Windows Mobile);
- Executive Vice President of Applications andServices Qi Lu (former presidentof Microsoft Online Services);
- ExecutiveVice President, Cloud and Enterprise Satya Nadella (former president of theServer & Tools Business).
Larson-Green'sprevious role is trimmed back a bit, pulling away her responsibility forWindows and limiting her to running Microsoft hardware programs and developmentof games. That means she'll head up the Surface tablets and Xbox, filling thevoid left by Don Mattrick when he left Microsoft last week to head up Zynga.
Last fallLarson-Green was vice president of program management for the Windowsexperience when then-president of Windows and Windows Live, Steven Sinofskyquit right after launching Windows 8 and introducing Microsoft's Surfacetablet. In the aftermath, she was promoted to head up Windows Engineering.
Until then herexperience had been all in software, having worked on the user experience forInternet Explorer and managing programs, UI design and R and D for Windows 7and Windows 8. In the past Ballmer has praised her technical expertise, designskills and communication abilities.
[MICROSOFT:Purges, personalities & pursuing other opportunities]
Myerson's shift to head up engineering of operating systems gives him authority over not just Windows Phone but also Windows 8, which could help advance Microsoft's goal ofmaking it easier to write applications that run on both platforms. He is also in charge of operating systems for Xbox.
He led the MicrosoftExchange team for eight years before running the Windows Phone division.
Lu is very importantto business customers as his job puts him in charge of research and developmentfor Microsoft Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Lync, Skype,Bing, Bing Apps, and MSN. He also heads up the Advertising Platforms and Businessgroup.
His previousresponsibility was for search, portal and online advertising efforts, whichincluded Bing. Before coming to Microsoft he worked for 10 years at Yahoo,where he also worked on search and advertising.
Nadella's roleremains pretty much the same, building and running the company's computingplatforms, developer tools and cloud services. He deals closely with developersand promotes Microsoft's concept of the Cloud OS a blend of Windows Serverand Windows Azure cloud services to provide flexible cloud resources andsupport hybrid clouds.
Windows Server, SQLServer, Visual Studio, System Center and Windows Azure fall under his purview.
Tim Greene covers Microsoft and unified communicationsfor Network World and writes the Mostly Microsoft blog.Reach him at tgreene@nww.com andfollow him on Twitter@Tim_Greene.
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