Microsoft reorg: Who's in; who's out
Summary: On February 14, Microsoft announced a corporate reorganization affecting many of its divisions.As with any Microsoft early-year reorg -- which typically occur after the company's fiscal mid-year reviews -- there are winners and losers. Check out my slideshow of who's in and who's out as a result of today's changes.
On February 14, Microsoft announced a corporate reorganization affecting many of its divisions.
As with any Microsoft early-year reorg -- which typically occur after the company's fiscal mid-year reviews -- there are winners and losers. Check out my slideshow of who's in and who's out as a result of today's changes.
As of today's reorg announcement, a bunch of execs got fancy new titles and promotions. A few veterans are out -- or on their way out. Keep in mind that some of the execs mentioned in today's official press release from Microsoft actually announced their departures months ago. Microsoft swept up all of the big comings and goings into today's announcement for simplicity's sake (not to mention to keep the noise about executive departures to a minimum).
The biggest winner in Microsoft's Valentine's Day reorg, in my opinion, was Bill Veghte. Veghte used to be Corporate Vice President of the Windows Business Group. Now he is Senior vice president of the newly merged Online Services & Windows Business Group. Vehghte's "expanded role" calls for him to spearhead "all end-user business strategy, sales and marketing across Windows Client, Windows Live, MSN and Search. In addition, he will continue to have shared responsibility for OEM sales."
(At Microsoft, a Senior VP title outweighs a Corporate VP one, for those trying to make sense of the ever-changing Microsoft org chart.)
Check out the slideshow of Who's Hot and Who's Not -- after today's Microsoft reorg.
The biggest mystery, post-reorg, remains Senior Vice Presient and former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews. No new title, no noticeable new responsibilities -- yet. Company watchers are betting on McAndrews to become the new head of the Yahoo acquisition (whenever and if ever that deal is consumated.)
Who's on the outs after today's reorg?
* Online Services Business chief Steve Berkowitz is leaving, as previously rumored, (though not until August 2008).
* Mobile Communications chief Pieter Knook is out and replaced by former Server and Tools manager Andrew Lees.
* Former Windows marketing chief Mike Sievert is out, replaced by Brad Brooks, who is now Corporate Vice President of Windows Consumer Product Marketing. (Interesting that the word "consumer" is in there. Microsoft has had an informal division between consumer and business marketing in Windows, but it's rare to see anyone's title clearly call it out.)
* Sanjay Parthasarathy, former Corporate VP of Developer and Platform Evangelism, is out of his DPE spot, as reported a month ago; his replacement is Walid Abu-Habda. Still no word on what Parthasarathy's next move is. Last word from him was he intended to stay at Microsoft in some new role. Update: Now we know what that role is: Corporate Vice President, Startup Business Accelerator.
* Scott Di Valerio, former head of Microsoft's OEM business who resigned months ago, is gone and now replaced by Corporate VP Steve Guggenheimer.
Other newly minted Microsoft Senior VPs, as of today, include:
- Chris Capossela, senior vice president, Information Worker Product Management Group.
- Kurt DelBene, senior vice president, Office Business Platform Group. \
- Antoine Leblond, senior vice president, Office Productivity Applications Group.
- Andy Lees, senior vice president, Mobile Communications Business. Lees takes the place of Pieter Knook, who is joining Vodafone.
- Satya Nadella, senior vice president, Search, Portals & Advertising Group. According to the Microsoft press release, "Nadella will continue to lead Microsoft’s engineering efforts across Live Search, Microsoft adCenter, and Subscriptions, Points and Billing platforms. He will also take over responsibility for MSN programming and engineering." Steven Sinofsky is still the Senior VP in charge of engineering for Windows Live (and Windows).
- S. Somasegar, senior vice president, Developer Division.
A few more promotions that I see as interesting:
* Scott Guthrie, a former general manager in Microsoft's Developer Division, gets a promotion and a new title of corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform. His responsibilities don't change, however, according to Microsoft: He will continue to oversee "several development teams responsible for delivering Microsoft Visual Studio developer tools and Microsoft .NET Framework technologies for building client and Web applications."
* Roz Ho -- one time head of Microsoft Mac Business Unit turned general manager working on a secret project in the Microsoft Mobile and Entertainment Division -- is now officially corporate vice president, Premium Mobile Offerings. "Ho will lead the new Danger Inc. team and continue to focus on various consumer-focused premium mobile offerings in mobile communications," Microsoft officials said. (Can you say Pink and Purple?)
What else do you make of these latest organizational changes?
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Talkback
Not much important
All of the Ballmerian box shuffling cannot hide this fact: he is incapable of
managing change and producing shareholder returns because he cannot produce
innovation that the market accepts.
Xbox is an ROI failure; Vista is a market failure; Search is a market failure - the
stalled Yahoo acquisition demonstrates this; WM on which the bloatmeisters have
lavished years and billions has, in a short space of time, been overtaken by the
iPhone - with further evidence of its irrelevancy and unuse, the recent disclosure
that iPhone web usage is 60 times greater! - and its uselessness as an MSFT product has been demonstrated; about the Zune, the less said, the better; it is
simply an embarrassment - what were they thinking?!.
No amount of yearly reviews and other HR folderol will conceal the lake of top
management capability.
Simply put, Ballmer is, as he is portrayed in his YouTube, a buffoon.
He must go. Soon.
Maybe Microsoft should emulate Apple (again)...
But then, when you look at their products.......
You mean give up 90% of the market
How would that give up 90% of the market?
So how many times, now has MS re-organized
Endless shuffling of chairs among management is generally not a good sign.
Emulate Apple!?!?!?
Yes and no. Apple [b]knows[/b] how to market. What Apple truly sucks at is meeting client expectations.
Examples: iPhone. Fantastic. Too bad you are stuck with [b]ONE[/b] service provider. Worse, they attempted to rig the iPhone to keep buyers from choosing their own provider.
MacBook Air. Apple made it sound like the hottest thing since sliced bread. But they surprised everyone by keeping it free of any wired connectivity. Worse, with a bit of research you find out it's not the lightest and smallest. Thinnest yes.
Microsoft is also guilty of "overselling" it's products e.g. not being completely truthful about features and improvements, tending to make things sound much better (sexier, slicker) than they actually are. But Microsoft does eventually meet the promises it makes.
So if M$ had the marketing wow of Apple maybe they'd have something unbeatable.
Re: iPhone
By the way, it takes more than marketing wow to have something unbeatable. It takes "wow" products. Seen any from Microsoft recently? Maybe I missed them.
But what is "wow"?
Everybody "wowed" at the Emperor's new clothes...
Goodmorning Mary Jo ; HAL has need of AMD to drop CABINET>pdb from GB email
That's right, you already know me.
All who are willing
welcomed in Redmond. Others need not apply.
Kindly submit your applications elsewhere,
please, and take you worthless resumes with
you.
Those of you who have managed to infiltrate
our impenetrable security defenses, beware!
You are on your way out. Subito. Presto.
Speedily. Immediately. Rat now, even.
Interlopers not welcome.
or take another bite of the Apple, Inc
Some of you guys need to lay of the Kool-Aid
Sure, Microsoft has some big challenges ahead of it. How to do software as a service, web adverstising, etc, but it will get its hands on Yahoo, one way or another and that should help out a lot in the web space.
Micorosoft is a far more capable company than the Linux joes like to admit. Not perfect by any stretch, but very capable.
Online Office
Course they are way behind on this effort compared to the plethora of online productivity suites already available. But if they are as thorough as they were with Internet Explorer the "come from behind" on this effort will be a memory in a year.
Microsoft's biggest problem in recent memory is Vista. Apparently the team in charge was hard to dissuade from it's course. But if M$ is good at anything it's good at recovery.
Plethora?
What are you talking about, Google apps?
Please. If anything, the pretenders to the Office throne have been TOO SLOW in actually delivering on their so far empty promises of "cloud computing".
Google writer and Google calc arent going to cut it. There is no "come from behind" here; it is an all out race to an end that no one has yet delivered on and, to be honest, isnt really proven from a commercial viability sense.
Vista is "a problem" in the eyes of MSFT bashers, tech columnists, bloggers, bashers and other internet loons. Commercially, it's doing fine and even Apples idiot smeer campaign didnt stop the company from delivering good numbers to investors.
Yeah yeah, "but its not fair! its shipping on new PCs! that shouldnt count!!!" Well, meanwhile it is and it does and the end result will be that in short time Vista will replace XP and EXACTLY the same as XP replacing 2000 and 2000 replacing 98, no one will remember this idiotic nit picking and bellyaching.
This crap has been going on since MS-DOS 3.31 was replaced by DOS 4.0. It happens on the Mac also... Everytime the System version rolled forward and then big time when Apple completely cut off ALL legacy users and went to OSX.
People just hate change and LOVE complaining.
Yeah, right!
with profits just like GM.
Progress, ever downward!
LOL!
Correct! Almost...........
and good sense 8-)
Yes XBox and Vista are failures
Typical, only focusing on the major players...
After one of these "purges" whole groups of regular workers get targeted. I was there way back as a consultant, so I had no vested interest really (always keep my breifcase packed next to the door of my office, and always have). I did however get a lesson is ruthlessness and pure spite.
That is one of the reasons I never tried to again work for Microsoft, advised friends not to work there and remained a consultant until I retired.
BallmerSoft Forming!
the old guard will be gone and I will have my "rubber-
stamp" team in place! It will be glorious!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com