4 Microsoft Executives to Leave in Top-Level Shake-Up

New York Times ^ | June 17,2015 | Nick Wingfield

[dayglored]

SEATTLE — Four senior Microsoft executives, including Stephen Elop and Mark Penn, will leave the technology company, in the biggest organizational shake-up yet under chief executive Satya Nadella.

In an email sent to Microsoft employees on Wednesday morning, Mr. Nadella said three of the departures were related to his decision to organize the company’s engineering efforts into three groups. The three executives leaving as a result are Mr. Elop, the former chief executive of Nokia who has been leading Microsoft’s devices group; Eric Rudder, the leader of its advanced technology and education efforts; and Kirill Tatarinov, the head of its business solutions group.

“To better align our capabilities and, ultimately, deliver better products and services our customers love at a more rapid pace, I have decided to organize our engineering effort into three groups that work together to deliver on our strategy and ambitions,” Mr. Nadella said in the email. Mr. Nadella was named the chief executive of Microsoft in February 2014.

The group Mr. Elop had been leading will be folded into a Windows and devices group that will be overseen by Terry Myerson. Mr. Tatarinov’s group will become part of a cloud and enterprise team led by Scott Guthrie. Qi Lu, the head of Microsoft’s applications and services group, will take over the education initiatives formerly led by Mr. Rudder.

Mr. Nadella said that Mr. Penn, Microsoft’s chief strategy officer, informed him several months ago that he planned to leave Microsoft in September to form a private equity fund, among other pursuits. While Mr. Penn has worked for Microsoft for a number of years, he is best known as a former campaign strategist for Hillary and Bill Clinton.

[RayChuang88]

I think Microsoft is already going in the right direction by actually listening to its end users with Windows 10. I've seen demos of Windows 10 and people used to Windows 7, Vista and XP should be able to transition to Windows 10 with relatively little difficulty, unlike Windows 8, which required you have to totally learn a new user interface (one that a lot of users hated like Conservatives disliked Obama).

[unlearner]

I am an Android user myself, but Apple did create the smart phone MARKET.

[snippy_about_it]

Cute, but the H1B would be here in the U.S., this picture is of their outsourcing office.

[Erik Latranyi]

I am an Android user myself, but Apple did create the smart phone MARKET.

I disagree.

Smartphones were growing in leaps and bounds. Both Blackberry & Microsoft were the main suppliers to AT&T, Verizon, etc.

The phones were becoming mini-computers, but the OS and processors were not capable of handling it.

Apple jumped in with simplified hardware and a simple, but robust OS and exploded onto the market.

The market existed.....Apple commoditized it well through simplicity.

iPhones never really brought out features that could not be found elsewhere.

Their popularity also drove the Apps market for them.

Now that processors and hardware have advanced, smartphones are becoming nearly as powerful as PCs....which is why you see Microsoft trying to leap ahead with a unified OS (Windows 10) that covers PC, Tablet, Laptop, Phone and Game Station (Xbox), giving users a familiar feel and experience among all their devices as well as seamless synchronization among their devices.

What Windows hopes is that you can see all your files, emails, etc on any device...including your Xbox.

Additionally, games could be played across devices.

Microsoft is betting on convergence.

[setha]

That’s their ultimate destination.

[Alas Babylon!]

I know Rudder. He’s a nice guy. I wonder what really happened...

Once he got into with Balmer, and they said you could hear the screaming even in the hallways, and Balmer’s office door was extra thick.

IMHO, anyone who got a change to yell at Balmer was a hero!

[minnesota_bound]

Satya Nadella will replace them with H1B visa people.
That is how he started right?

[unlearner]

“Smartphones were growing in leaps and bounds. Both Blackberry & Microsoft were the main suppliers to AT&T, Verizon, etc.”

You may be confusing feature phones with smart phones. Feature phones had similar capabilities but were hardware centric which limited expanding their capabilities. Smart phones were built to support an OS which could be expanded by adding apps.

The earlier smart phones used Windows CE and Palm operating systems. They were failures. So yes, smart phones existed, but the market did not because no one took the time to figure out what people would want until Steve Jobs.

Then Google jumped in. No one else has made a dent in the market including RIM (Blackberry), Microsoft, Palm, Amazon, and Mozilla.

While I prefer Android over iPhone, I credit Jobs and Apple with the marketing needed to give this sector momentum. Either Palm or RIM COULD have done it, but they did not. I think Microsoft never had a chance.

My 2 cents.

[rarestia]

Nadella in many ways wants a “fresh start” for Microsoft and putting in new people is important to changing the Microsoft culture.

Agreed. This is par for the course with most of corporate America. New head honcho comes in and he either fills positions with his friends/allies or promotes the best brown-nosers among the remaining middle-tier managers.

Nadella has done some great things with Microsoft up to this point. Let's see if this new strategy pays dividends.

[RayChuang88]

If I were Nadella, I'd pay a courtesy visit to the Google campus and after getting an agreement with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, make sure all Google services (Mail, YouTube, Search, etc.) are available as apps for Windows 10 on both the desktop and mobile versions.

Nadella has done a lot to get rid of the "rust" created by Ballmer's long tenure at Microsoft, and has done a very good job so far.

[rarestia]

Google’s data collection methodology is anathema to Microsoft’s. I’m not saying either party is free from reproach, but Google is demonstrably worse for privacy than Microsoft.

[RayChuang88]

While I agree, for Windows Phone 10 to be popular they DO need those Google apps--especially Mail and YouTube. That's why expect Nadella to pay a courtesy visit to Google very soon.

[daniel1212]

One thing (not a biggie) i hope they listen to (though Windows Feedback as well as file size is missing now form my install of Windows 10 preview, Version Build 10074) is that of file deletion and copying.

As with recent OS versions of Windows since XP, it takes a long time to calculate 20GB of files and for the first few minutes after it began deletion it estimated it would take over 3 hours to delete them. This is under a 2.8GHZ dual core, with almost 2GB free ram, deleting files from a SATA drive, and with Windows Explorer the only thing using more than 3% of the CPU cycles.

After about 4 min. that estimation changed to 45 minutes and remained there for about 5 min., then changed to 30 min. 8 minutes later that estimation changed to 24 min. 11 minutes more that changed to 21 min. Then it increased to 22 minutes about 3 min later. About 4 minutes later that changed to 5 seconds, where it remained for about 10 minutes, then changed to a finally accurate 4 minutes.

Thus, despite the time taken for calculation, its estimation was fairly useless. while the time taken to delete 20GB of files

I could have right clicked and chosen Unlocker (thank God for freeware, but opt out of any bundled additions) to delete at next boot, but did not.

Copying files also requires calculation of time, resulting in various conflicting estimations of time remaining (7 min. to 23 min. to “more than one day,” etc. for 20GB, ),

But thank God for the many many things that Windows does do well