It’s official: Windows is old news, and Microsoft is “embracing” cloud and edge computing as the company’s future, according to an all-employee email from CEO Satya Nadella.
This means a major reorganization and includes the departure of 21-year Microsoft veteran Terry Myerson, who will “pursue his next chapter outside Microsoft,” according to Nadella. The outgoing Windows executive vice president described it as an “emotional day” in a LinkedIn blog post. “Satya and I have been discussing this for some time, but today it becomes real,” Myerson wrote.
Also, the company will form two new business groups and split Windows between the two of them. One group focusing on end-user “experience and devices” will house Windows, Office, devices and third-party applications. Rajesh Jha, EVP of the Office 365 group, will lead the group.
Scott Guthrie will run the second cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) business unit.
“The purpose of this team is to drive platform coherence and compelling value across all layers of the tech stack starting with the distributed computing fabric (cloud and edge) to AI (infrastructure, runtimes, frameworks, tools, and higher-level services around perception, knowledge, and cognition),” Nadella wrote in the email.
As part of the shift to increase emphasis on cloud, Azure’s Jason Zander is being promoted to EVP of Azure and will lead the Azure team. Windows platform employees will join the Azure group. “Windows platform is already a core part of Azure across both the cloud and edge, and this shift will enable us to accelerate our efforts to build a unified distributed computing infrastructure and application model,” the email explained.
Microsoft led the big three cloud pack in terms of cloud growth for the most recent quarter. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the largest cloud provider, Microsoft Azure revenue increased a whopping 98 percent.
