Devices and Studios Engineering Group – Julie Larson-Green will lead this group and will have repsonsiblity for all hardware development. She will also take responsibility for all games, music, video and other entertainment;
Applications and Services Engineering Group, to be led by Qi Lu, will cover 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 back-end technologies like datacenter, database and specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools;
Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run the Dynamics family of business applications, but his product leaders will also report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will also report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will also report to the COO group;
In the Advanced Strategy and Research Group, Eric Rudder will lead research and trustworthy computing, teams focused on the intersection of technology and policy, and will look at key new technology trends;
Business Development and Evangelism Group will be led by Tony Bates. It will focus on key partnerships especially with partners like OEMs and silicon vendors, as well as evangelism and developer outreach.
Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, said that for companies the size of Microsoft reorganization may take several years and may “never be done” since enterprises or its scale are typically “perpetually reorganizing.”
The impact of reorganization will be “subtle and long term” said research firm Directions Microsoft which tracks developments at Microsoft.
He said this recent development seems to be the biggest change in the company since Directions started watching Microsoft. Helm expects the changes to be more about “whom than how they’ll reorganize.”
What does this mean for the customer?
The reorganization will decide which products go together and which products go to market, said Fran Gallet, analyst for Forrester Research.
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Why stick with Microsoft?
He said recent developments at Microsoft seem to indicate that the company doesn’t expect to make much money in software anymore. The operating system is becoming just one element of the device.
For example SkyDrive, the online storage and syncing service of Microsoft, is being monetize when people buy a device.
There is also a chance that users will see “more seamless and better experience” between different devices such as smart phones and PCs, according to Moorhead.