Microsoft Corporation Shakes Up Leadership Team

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the changes in the company’s senior leadership team to align its engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on strategy.

In an e-mail to employees, Nadella said the change will allow Microsoft to “deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace.”

He also emphasized that Microsoft has three interconnected and bold ambitions: (1)reinvent productivity and business processes,(2) build the intelligent cloud platform, and (3) create more personal computing.

Changes to Microsoft senior leadership team

According to Nadella, he made a decision to organize Microsoft’s engineering efforts into three groups to work together to deliver on the company goal and strategy.

Terry Myerson will lead Windows and Devices Group (WDG), which combines the engineering efforts of the current Operating Systems Groupo and Microsoft Devices Group (MDG) led by Stephen Elop.

According to Nadella, the WDG brings together all the engineering capability required to drive breakthrough innovations that would bring the Windows ecosystem forward. It would also position Windows as a service across Microsoft devices including Lumia, Surface, HoloLens, Surface Hun, Band, and Xbox.

Scott Guthrie will continue to lead the Cloud and Enterprise (C+E). The team is focused on building the intelligent cloud platform of Microsoft. It would also concentrate in building high-value infrastructure and business services that are unique to customers such as data, analytics products, business processes, security, and management offerings.

The Dynamics products development teams will join the C&E team to accelerate further the company’s work on ERP and CRM.

Qi Lu will continue to lead the Application and Services Group (ASG), which is focused on reinventing productivity. The team is leading the development of productivity services for digital across all devices. Nadella said Microsoft’s engineering efforts to build a solution for education would be transferred to the ASG team.

Stephen Elop retires

Nadella also announced that Stephen Elop’s retirement. Elop led the Operating Systems Group and Microsoft Devices Group when he returned to Microsoft after its $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services business.

“Stephen and I have agreed that now is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft. I regret the loss of leadership that this represents, and look forward to seeing where his next destination will be,” said Nadella.
Three other executives including Kiril Tatarinov, Eric Rudder, and Mark Penn also decided to leave Microsoft to explore other opportunities.

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