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Microsoft's Pall moves back to working on the Skype business

It's Microsoft musical-management chairs time again. The latest move to monitor: Gurdeep Singh Pall is the new head of engineering and operations for Microsoft's Skype business.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall is back to working on the company's Skype business, after serving on the Online Services Division's leadership team.

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Pall, as reported by AllThingsD on October 29, Microsoft named Pall as Corporate Vice President for Skype, replacing Mark Gillett. Gillett is going to private equity firm Silver Lake. Gillett was in charge of Skype product, engineering and operations worldwide, which is now Pall's job.

Pall's roots at Microsoft are in unified communications. Back in 2011, Pall was 100 percent focused on “working on Skype strategy." Once Microsoft's acquisition of Skype closed, Pall was appointed Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Information Platform & Experience team. He became part of Microsoft's Online Services Division's senior leadership team at that time and was "responsible for vision, product strategy and R&D for the Bing services and platform that includes mobile, mapping, and speech."

Earlier this year, Pall -- Executive Vice President for Bing, was talking up the evolution of Bing as a development platform. Now he's back to unified communications and will be running Microsoft's combined Skype and Lync teams. (Lync falls under Skype, these days.)

I've asked Microsoft who will be filling Pall's shoes on the Bing team. No word back yet.

Update: Zig Serafin will be running the Information Platform & Experiences team. Serafin most recently was General Manager in Microsoft's Unified Communications Group.

For those trying to keep track of Microsoft's musical management chairs, Tony Bates, the former CEO of Skype (before Microsoft bought it in May 2011 for $8.5 billion), is now executive vice president of Microsoft’s Business Development and Evangelism group, responsible for the company's relationships with key OEMs, ISvs and developers. Bates also leads Microsoft’s corporate strategy team and is believed to be in the running to replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's CEO.

Skype (and Lync) are part of Microsoft's new Applications and Services group, headed by Qi Lu. Bing also is part of Lu's reorg'd team. 

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