“In a large staff memo, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer details how the company is aiming for a ‘One Microsoft’, by altering its organization around the ‘devices and services’ vision. Terry Myerson will lead a new operating systems engineering group that will span across console, mobile device, and PC. Myerson used to lead the Windows Phone group at Microsoft. Julie Larson-Green takes over a new devices and studios engineering group.”
Hello IBM?
I am not sure how similar the parallels are, but IBM shed a quite robust hardware manufacturing business(laptops, pcs, even , hard drives), and they did not have a wildly popular suite of desktop and server software packages.
Microsoft is not shedding hardware (Xbox One and beyond), and with the rumors of MS considering a nokia purchase (maybe they’ll purchase HTC instead?), looks like MS wants to build even more in the future.
Edited 2013-07-11 13:38 UTC
Stephen Elop shot down rumors of a Nokia purchase by Microsoft, even just the D&S division.
Because the phone division didn’t deliver they disbanded it and made its leader the leader of everything? Great thinking.
I think microsoft might be missing some of the lessons currently being learned in business. Instead of having a restructuring where you consolidate power, you should look to create an environment of experimentation and constructive failure. The market moves way too fast for a monolithic management structure to adapt (ie RIM/Blackberry, HP, IBM, Xerox, etc).
Now they still can do this, even with consolidated power, but it could be a rough ride.
Where does that place the Mac BU?
Why wouldn’t it still be in the Office division?
It still is in the Office division.
Microsoft is a company that always needed a lot of time and iterations to get products to a mature status, and they always develop all their technology and platforms in-house.
Their competition has grown accustomed to using open platforms and technologies and share a large part of their development efforts with other companies or the community.
Microsoft just can’t catch up using their obsolete model of doing everything in-house, not only they are more expensive, but also it pisses off the developer community each time they abandon a technology they introduced a few years ago promising it as the future.
They simply don’t have enough resources to develop everything in-house anymore, it’s obvious when you see IE11, Windows 8 or WP8, which are full of neat ideas but feel crippled and buggy compared to the competition.
It’s not enough with restructuring, they need a change of management that accepts they can’t compete anymore against open technologies.
Edited 2013-07-11 19:32 UTC
Are they keeping the same silly zap one of five review process? The blackberries can run Android apps with minimal changes. A great echochamber does not make a great ecosystem