Microsoft Reshuffles Senior Leadership Deck, Elop Exits
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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Derek Forrest was a contributing freelance writer for Tom's Hardware. He covered hardware news and reviews, focusing on gaming desktops and laptops.
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Durandul Now bring back more desktop theming options, aero, classic, whatnot, and full parity between "modern apps" and desktop applications and we're good :)Reply -
junkeymonkey maybe these new guys will see there desktop os as a desktop os , and not treat it like some kind of novelty item ??Reply -
back_by_demand It's an exciting time for Microsoft, perhaps it's good news Elop is out and allow the geeks to run the company instead of the businessmen.Reply -
uglyduckling81 Luckily MS have a complete monopoly of the OS space so it really makes no difference what they do.Reply
A comment during a MS executive meeting.
"A bad OS? Never mind those people that don't buy our product this time will buy next time. What else are they going to do? Use Linux.....(as a group)hahahahhhhh" A MS Executive. -
junkeymonkey same can be said about 8 and 8.1 . all 10 is going to be is 8.2 . that number change to 10 aint fooling me .. lolReply -
HyperMatrix Windows 10 is brilliant....check out the latest releases. I'm actually finding it hard to use Windows 7 at work now. Windows 10 makes accessing settings and features faster. And the OS as a whole is quicker. And it's oh so pretty to look at. :PReply
The only problems that remain in Windows 10, from my point of view, are as follows:
- DirectX app freeze still ends up as an overlay on your computer so you can't tab out, open task manager, and kill the task. However...you can pre-bind a "kill switch" (.bat file) to AutoHotKey and activate that to run it, and terminate the offending app easily. When a solution exists...I don't see why they don't resolve it. Your average user isn't going to do this, and will end up having to reboot their PC even when the OS hasn't crashed. Just the one DirectX game has frozen, and remains on top of the OS visually.
- Microsoft Edge Browser. Great browser. Very fast. Much better on laptops than Chrome due to significantly lower use of CPU time (therefore...better battery life). But...lack of extensions. This is problematic.
- App store. It still feels...uhmm...every word that's coming to mind would be inappropriate to use. It needs a full and complete overhaul. The sandboxed nature of the apps is an amazing thing to have, as it means less chance of a virus or malware bogging down your average computer user's desktop/laptop. They just need to make the app store better. And to create a "certified" list of apps that lets you weed out all the trash fake scam apps. I haven't checked in a little bit but before when you searched for Facebook, 50 different apps came up, all using variations of the official Facebook logo. That's a huge issue. They need to implement an easy refund option similar to what Android has to get people to use it more, which also makes it less likely for people to put crappy apps up to mislead people, as the person they mislead can now easily uninstall it and get a refund.
Other than that...functionally, Windows 10 is a brilliant system. -
bmwman91 ReplyIf you care even a tiny bit about your privacy, you will avoid Windows 10.
And Android, and iOS, and OSX, and basically every modern OS that is hungry for all of your information and transactions to pass through it. -
PaulBags What does "creating more personal computing" mean??Reply
"Windows 10 makes accessing settings and features faster" - does this mean they rolled back their cumulative cluster Fs and windows 10 is basically windows xp 2016?