In an effort to align the company's engineering divisions with its core ambitions, Microsoft announced changes to its Senior Leadership Team via an email to company employees.
"We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in the blog post. "This change will enable us to deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace."
These "core ambitions" include reinventing productivity and business processes, building the intelligent cloud platform, and creating more personal computing. It makes one wonder how the engineering divisions weren't in the loop on these primary goals already, because all of these ambitions seem to hinge on how well Microsoft products are, well, engineered.
A new team called the Windows and Devices Group (WDG) will consist of the engineering efforts of the current Operating Systems Group and Microsoft Devices Group and will focus on "enabling more personal computing experiences" powered by the Windows ecosystem. Executive Vice President Terry Myerson will lead the new division.
Executive Vice Presidents Scott Guthrie and Qi Lu will both continue to lead their respective divisions, with Guthrie's Cloud and Enterprise (C+E) team gaining the support of the Dynamics development team in an effort to accelerate ERP and CRM work for mainstream C+E engineering and innovations.
This shuffle actually sees more executives leaving the company than joining it. Stephen Elop, Kirill Tatarinov, and Eric Rudder are all out after a designated transition period as a direct result of the restructuring. Unrelated to the paradigm shift, Chief Insights Officer Mark Penn has given his notice and will be leaving Microsoft in September to pursue other ventures.
Microsoft's announcement can be seen as a positive step in the right direction, as poor Windows 8/8.1 sales and customer dissatisfaction has left some consumers with a bad taste in their mouth. Perhaps, just as Microsoft has seemingly done, it is time to cleanse your palate and try something new. With Windows 10 and DirectX 12 coming very soon, Xbox 360 game compatibility was announced for Xbox One, and with this new corporate restructuring, one has to assume Microsoft is learning from its mistakes and is making a conscious effort to create positive changes internally, as well as for their customers.
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