CEO Steve Ballmer officially pulled the trigger on a significant reorganization plan for the technology titan just a few hours back, and along with some sweeping changes it has also raised a few concerns.
Interestingly, most senior leaders at Microsoft who are in charge of their particular divisions have had a rather interesting change in their formal title. Many of the top executives at the company previously had “President” as their formal title — now they have got a new title of “Executive Vice President”.
The Senior Leaders webpage at Microsoft recently got revamped, and shows that only Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner have kept their previous titles. Everyone else on the page is now an “Executive Vice President” at the company.
Here is a list of the big changes:
- Terry Myerson will take charge of the OS division, which now includes development of both, Windows and the Xbox software.
- Julie Larson-Green is now responsible of all of Microsoft’s hardware products, from Surface to Xbox, along with the music, video and games division.
- Qi Lu will head up online services.
- Satya Nadella is named in charge of cloud services.
- Tony Bates, the Skype president, is now the head of the company’s Business Development and Evangelism division.
- Kurt DelBene, previously the head of the Office division, is retiring from Microsoft.
- Rick Rashid will also leave as the head of Microsoft Research and instead will now work to help develop core OS innovation in its operating systems group.
Further adjustments include Tami Reller heading up all marketing at Microsoft, while Eric Rudder will now lead the Research team. Craig Mundie has also had a change from senior advisor to working on an unnamed special project for Ballmer through the end of 2013.
He will become a consultant for Microsoft, before retiring at the end of 2014. Other Microsoft leaders like COO Kevin Turner and Amy Hood, the CFO, will stay in their job — though Hood also gets the title of Executive Vice President added.
So, where does this leave Ballmer? Some circles are already suggesting that this restructuring gives even more power to Steve Ballmer, who is, in fact, yet to groom a successor for when he leaves the post of CEO in a few years.
Ballmer is set to hold a phone conference with members of the media and financial analysts later in the day at 12:30 PM Pacific Time (3:30 PM Eastern). Maybe he gets a chance to answer the question above.
