Microsoft has announced a major internal reorganization, as well as the departure of Windows chief Terry Myerson, who joined the company 21 years ago.
In a public letter, CEO Satya Nadella announced the formation of two new engineering teams, one focused on experiences and devices, the other cloud and AI, the latter of which has seen significant growth in recent years.
The experiences and devices team will be led by Rajesh Jha, the current executive vice president for the product group.
Nadella writes that the purpose of this team is “to instill a unifying product ethos across our end-user experiences and devices.”
Under this umbrella, there will be further leadership changes.
Microsoft Surface chief Panos Panay will now serve as chief product officer, leading Microsoft’s “devices vision.” Joe Belfiore will continue leading on Windows experiences, while Kudo Tsunoda will continue leading the ‘New Experiences and Technology’ team and Brad Anderson will continued to head up enterprise mobility and management.
Azure head Scott Guthrie will expand his role at Microsoft and lead the second major engineering team, focused on the cloud and artificial intelligence.
On this side of the company, Jason Zander is being promoted to head Azure and the Windows team will join Zander’s team.
Meanwhile, technical fellow Alex Kipman will lead a new ‘AI Perception and Mixed Reality’ team, which brings together speech, vision, MR and additional ‘perception capabilities’ into one team.
AI data and infrastructure executive Eric Boyd will lead a new ‘AI Cognitive Services and Platform.’
Microsoft is also creating an AI and Ethics in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee, to discuss policy on how to responsibly handle the development of AI. This will be led by AI and research head Harry Shum and Microsoft’s chief legal officer, Brad Smith.
Nadella caps off the letter by stating: “It’s amazing what we have been able to accomplish together, and yet I still believe we are in the very early days of what is possible.”
The CEO notes that the changes will be discussed internally at a Q&A next week.
Source: Microsoft
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