Steve Ballmer Reorganizing Microsoft 387
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft's big reorganization has begun. Rumors had persisted for weeks that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was planning a massive, once-in-a-lifetime reorganization of the company he's been running for quite some time. Now the plan is out in the open, and things are going to change in huge ways. Microsoft will coalesce around 'a single strategy as one company,' CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in a really lengthy memo posted on Microsoft's Website,
'not a collection of division strategies.'
The company's product portfolio — from Windows and Xbox to enterprise applications — will be regarded and operated upon in a holistic manner. Ballmer wants this
'one company' approach to extend how Microsoft handles its advertising, marketing and consumer-service operations. Ballmer also wants to knock down the walls that have slowly grown between Microsoft's various divisions, at least as far as engineering's concerned. The new 'engineering culture' will apparently facilitate collaboration 'across the company,' with an emphasis on cross-group contributions (and maintaining secrecy, of course, for the giant projects). Read on for much more on how Microsoft is reorganizing all its internal groups, as well as a rundown of who's in and who's out on the executive level."
Metro mother/Ribbon champion now in charge of Xbox (Score:2, Informative)
Julie Larson-Green, also in charge of Surface and games [nytimes.com].
Mother of Metro [theregister.co.uk].
Champion of Ribbon [theverge.com].
The names (Score:5, Informative)
Operating Systems Engineering Group. Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console, to mobile device, to PC, to back-end systems. The core cloud services for the operating system will be in this group.
Devices and Studios Engineering Group. Julie Larson-Green will lead this group and will have all hardware development and supply chain from the smallest to the largest devices we build. Julie will also take responsibility for our studios experiences including all games, music, video and other entertainment.
Applications and Services Engineering Group. Qi Lu will lead broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories.
Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. Satya Nadella will lead development of our back-end technologies like datacenter, database and our specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools. He will lead datacenter development, construction and operation.
Dynamics. Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run Dynamics as is, but his product leaders will dotted line report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will dotted line report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will dotted line report to the COO group.
Advanced Strategy and Research Group. Eric Rudder will lead Research, Trustworthy Computing, teams focused on the intersection of technology and policy, and will drive our cross-company looks at key new technology trends.
Marketing Group. Tami Reller will lead all marketing with the field relationship as is today. Mark Penn will take a broad view of marketing strategy and will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions.
COO. Kevin Turner will continue leading our worldwide sales, field marketing, services, support, and stores as well as IT, licensing and commercial operations.
Business Development and Evangelism Group. Tony Bates will focus on key partnerships especially our innovation partners (OEMs, silicon vendors, key developers, Yahoo, Nokia, etc.) and our broad work on evangelism and developer outreach. DPE, Corporate Strategy and the business development efforts formerly in the BGs will become part of this new group. OEM will remain in SMSG with Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Tony who will work closely with Nick Parker on key OEM relationships.
Finance Group. Amy Hood will centralize all product group finance organizations. SMSG finance, which is geographically diffuse, will report to Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Amy.
Legal and Corporate Affairs Group. Brad Smith will continue as General Counsel with responsibility for the company's legal and corporate affairs and will map his team to the new organization.
HR Group. Lisa Brummel will lead Human Resources and map her team to the new organization.
Re:Buh-bye, Microsoft! (Score:5, Informative)
I found a quicker fix for my dad's poorly performing new laptop. I removed the Norton virus. I did something similar with McAfee for a friend when it decided that the best way to protect her from the dangers of the internet was to disable her networking stack.
Re:Fixed that for you (Score:5, Informative)
GAAAH
I see this mistake everywhere now. The word is spelled reined when used in this context. "Reigned" was something a king did. "Reined" refers to something that was curtailed or brought under control - i.e., "I reined in my horse," meaning, I slowed down my horse by pulling on the reins, which is where the expression came from.
Empires are not kings. Empires do not (or did not) rule something. Therefore, it has to be "reined."
Re:Fixing the security problems (Score:5, Informative)
he did, in 2001
Vista SP2 and later is a whole new kernel that had been in development since 2001. smaller and modular unlike the bill gates throw everything into the kernel strategy
Windows 7 is exactly what you wanted. a new OS with backward compatibility. that's why its 20GB of disk space to install it. there are multiple versions of almost every file for backward compatibility
Walls between divisions (Score:5, Informative)
I once noted at an Exchange demonstration (put on by a professional Microsoft Evangelist) that not all of the new features in Exchange were supported in the new version of Outlook, which seemed odd. He confessed that the two teams are not allowed to talk to each other during initial development because of NDAs. The two divisions of the company are kept in the dark from each other, even though the two products are designed to work together.
I think many large companies suffer from their size.
Re:Fixed that for you (Score:5, Informative)
A more rational organization would have strangled the syntactic abomination that is powershell at birth.
Full disclosure: I use and despise Powershell every day. I'm getting better and better at both using and despising it.