The management at Microsoft has reorganized the multinational corporation on a number of occasions in order to amplify its innovation and unify its services and products. However, now a lengthy memo from CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has revealed that a massive change is coming in the hierarchy of the organization. As a result of this large restructuring Microsoft will now have four leaders and four key engineering groups. Previously the firm used to have five various business units, Microsoft Business Division, Online Services, Entertainment and Devices, Server and Tools and Windows, with each having its own CFO and president. Each of the new leaders will have substantial oversight power. With this heavy redeployment, Ballmer is looking to make his organization look simpler, but its not that easy to goal to acheive.
Here is how Microsoft has explained the groups, out of which the first four are completely new:
“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. (Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, and attached services)
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. (Surface, Xbox gaming and music, mice, keyboards, etc.)
Applications and Services Engineering Group: Qi Lu will lead broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories. (Office, Bing, MSN, Dynamics CRM and ERP, Skype, Yammer, Lync, etc.)
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. (Windows Server, Windows Azure, System Center, SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc.)
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 and Group Corporate Affairs Group: Brad Smith will continue as General Counsel with responsibility for the company’s legal 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.”
It seems that at the top level, Terry Myerson, Julie Larson-Green, and Qi Lu are the three leaders which possess more power. This could be judged from the fact that Myerson has been shifted from the supervision of Windows Phone to head all operating systems. Larson-Green on the other hand has got supervision of Microsoft’s entertainment and hardware division, whereas Lu will head apps division, which offer services like Yammer, Skype and Office.
Source: VB
Photo: TheDrum
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