Microsoft tweaks the Live side of the house
Summary: On July 1, Microsoft's new fiscal year started with a new slate of Live executives -- or at least a bunch of existing execs with new titles and responsibilities. It seems like Microsoft is finally reining in the runaway "Windows Live" brand and relegating it to being a subset of the larger "Microsoft Live" services effort.
On July 1, Microsoft's new fiscal year started with a new slate of Live executives -- or at least a bunch of existing execs with new titles and responsibilities.
Brian Arbogast, who had been running Microsoft's Windows Live Developer & Communications Platform for the past few years, is now the Corporate Vice President for the Mobile Services team within Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division. The Mobile Services team, according to Microsoft's Web site, is "responsible for delivering the mobile services strategy, platform, and experiences for Windows Live, as well as the strategy, platform, and integrated services for network operators and other syndication partners."
In his previous role, Arbogast spearheaded the development of the "core technology behind Windows Live mail, calendar (which still isn't released, mind you), contacts, storage, instant messaging, VOIP functionality, Microsoft's online identity services and the delivery of a broad developer ecosystem around the Windows Live platform" -- plus extending all these services to mobile devices and operators.
So who's going to run the development side of the Live house? It looks like the Windows Live Core all-star team is being moved into some of those roles.
As of June 27, David Treadwell -- previously a Corporate Vice President on the so-called "Windows Live Core" team -- got a new title and set of responsibilities. Treadwell is now Corporate Vice President in charge of Live Platform Services, "a group that’s defining and implementing the next generation of platform services that all Microsoft service-enabled applications and sites will use. These services include unified identity and directory, data synchronization, transport and presence, among others."
(It seems like Live Platform Services is the successor to what was called the Windows Live Platform Group, previously run by Blake Irving, who is on tap to retire from Microsoft this summer.)
The Live Platform Group, under Irving was charged with building and managing "datacenter and technical operations, advertising platform, storage and payments infrastructure, backend communications and collaboration platform, business and customer intelligence, security and safety, identity, VoIP, mobile, global development and supportability capabilities, supporting application services built across the company, including Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live and other Microsoft applications."
Amitabh Srivasta, a former Core Operating System Division (COSD) leader and Microsoft Technical Fellow, is also now a Corporate Vice President in charge of "Cloud Infrastructure Services."
There's no official explanation for what "Cloud Infrastructure Services" encompass on Microsoft's Web site, but the Windows Live Core team has been working on a number of database-related technologies designed to allow data and services to sync across a variety of platforms. Among projects believed to fall under the Live Core team's domain: Harmonica P2P mesh, CloudDB, Blue/Cloud, Velocity and a bunch of other near/longer term datacenter-technology components.
"We have been waiting for (Chief Software Architect) Ray Ozzie's Live Core to emerge, and this sounds like it's about to happen," said Kip Kniskern, a staff writer with LiveSide.Net. "While Microsoft is going to continue to place heavy emphasis on mobile, my guess is that moving Arbogast out of Live Platform and the Ozzie team into (Live Platform) is more about Core than it is about mobile."
To me, it looks like Microsoft is finally starting to rein in the runaway "Windows Live" brand, relegating it to a subset of the larger "Microsoft Live" services platform/strategy. Notice the growing number of Live properties springing up without the word "Windows": Live Maps, Live Search, Live Platform, ....
Any other observations about Microsoft's latest Live shufflings?
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
If the dog don't hunt, fire the managers ???
Live sounds almst like "i" as in Mac
some other basis for their hesitation to compete with the iphone? If not, then isn't
this their usual and customary shuffle of execs that takes place to make it look like
something of significance is happening? Or do they do the shuffle to cover up
product/project failures that would only be highlighed by firing the responsible
group exec? It seems to me that these under-performers are moved around until
they're close enough to the exit door to quietly fall out of their then-current roles
and into "retirement". Firing underperformers is always bad press.
Microsoft?
Maybe they should pay more attention?
Microsoft : The Fall From Grace
http://www.darkjedi.dk/?p=214http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1245710,00.htmlhttp://decodingliberation.blogspot.com/2007/06/another
In a time where their biggest product
launch in many years has just happened
Microsoft is suppose to be quite on top
of things. However, things are not well
at Microsoft even though their major
cash cows: Windows and Office has just
been launched in new versions. The
newest version of Windows - Vista - is
looking like a failure of graet
proportions on more than one front for
Microsoft. The hype surrounding the
launch of Vista is now being questioned
every day, like the great hype
surrounding Microsoft’s real support
intentions on “Games for Windows”. The
problems surrounding the “Windows Vista
Capable” stickers also ended up being an
embarrassing affair for Microsoft, when
customers discover that they had been
caught between hype and a lie. With
Vista Microsoft’s marketing department
outdone both themselves and the truth
resulting in great marketing deception
the real discussion quickly ended up in
one question: Was the sales of Vista
really good or bad?
When such a question is asked the
marketing department quickly readies
their hype machine and sets a spin on
every sales number they can find. Nobody
wants the investors to see the true
signs of a weakened Microsoft with
reduced earnings in sight. Unfortunately
for Microsoft they are the only one
knowing about the true sales numbers of
Vista. The hardware vendors have already
been complaining about the poor sales of
Vista, while Microsoft continues to deny
everything. Hauppage points to poor
sales of Vista, as well. The sales of
Vista in China cannot even be
categorized as poor, but catastrophic -
especially since this is a market
Microsoft is betting heavily on! The
demand for Vista is waining and has made
Dell allow customers to keep ordering
Windows XP for their new computers, but
Microsoft isn’t about to let this
continue - They need to show good Vista
sales numbers and they are having real
problems doing so!
RE: Microsoft tweaks the Live side of the house