Windows chief Terry Myerson is leaving Microsoft, and CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company is commencing another major upper management overhaul, with two new engineering teams being formed and new roles and responsibilities for several executives.
Nadella says this is part of the company’s push to “accelerate our innovation,” explaining that the future is now all about “intelligent cloud and intelligent edge.”
First and foremost, there’ll be a completely new team called Experiences & devices which will be led by Rajesh Jha. Nadella explains that the primary goal of this division is to guarantee a unified product “ethos” across all end-use experiences and devices. To make this happen, Microsoft is making the following changes, as announced by Nadella in a memo sent to employees (embedded below):
• Devices: Panos Panay will now serve as our Chief Product Officer and will lead our devices vision and further our product ethos across hardware and software boundaries for our first-party devices, while creating new categories and opportunities for the entire ecosystem
• Windows: Joe Belfiore will continue leading our Windows experiences and will drive Windows innovation in partnership with the PC and device ecosystem
• New Experiences and Technology: Kudo Tsunoda will continue to lead this team to define how we engage users with high-value experiences to help them achieve more.
• Enterprise Mobility and Management: Brad Anderson will continue to lead our Windows Enterprise deployment and management efforts
A second new team called Cloud + AI Platform will be led by Scott Guthrie and will be based on several changes that start with Jason Zander being promoted to executive vice president of Azure. A further leadership overhaul includes the following:
• The Windows platform team led by Harv Bhela, Henry Sanders and Michael Fortin will join Jason’s team
• Business AI: The Customer Service, Marketing and Sales Insights teams, previously led by Gurdeep Singh Pall, will join James Phillips’ Business Applications Group.
• Universal Store and Commerce Platform: Eric Lockard and his team will also join the Cloud + AI Platform team
• AI Perception & Mixed Reality (MR): Alex Kipman will lead this new team, which brings together all our speech, vision, MR and additional perception capabilities into one team
• AI Cognitive Services & Platform: Eric Boyd will lead this new team and drive our AI Platform, AI Fundamentals, Azure ML, AI Tools and Cognitive Services. Joseph Sirosh and team will join this new group. Eric and team will take guidance on all AI-related areas from Harry Shum and work very closely with AI+R.
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