Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the long-rumored reorganization of Microsoft today in a memo to employees.
“As the times change, so must our company,” Ballmer said in the memo. “We are rallying behind a single strategy as one company — not a collection of divisional strategies,” he said, adding that the changes “will enable us to execute even better on our strategy to deliver a family of devices and services that best empower people for the activities they value most and the enterprise extensions and services that are most valuable to business.”
The changes eliminate all of the company’s many unit president titles, changing them to executive vice presidents. Organization will be by function: Engineering, Marketing, Business Development and Evangelism, Advanced Strategy and Research, Finance, HR, Legal, and COO. For the game business, that means falling under Engineering, which has been organized into four units: Operating Systems, Applications and Services, Cloud and Enterprise, and Devices and Studios. The Devices and Studios unit, where the Xbox lives, will be headed by former Windows co-head Julie Larson-Green.
Ballmer stressed that this restructuring should lead to greater collaboration inside the company leading it to build better products faster and drive customer and shareholder value. What this specifically means for the Xbox business and games isn’t yet clear. There will probably be a new financial reporting structure which may give us less knowledge about exactly how well the Xbox and games are doing, though such changes may require regulatory approval.
Source: AllThingsD
