New Senior Leadership Team

A new leadership team will take control of Microsoft in a July 2013 reorganization that is the largest in over 10 years. The company has centralized business functions such as finance, marketing, and business development that were formerly distributed among product divisions. Most product divisions have been disbanded and replaced by new technology groups. Microsoft hopes the changes will help it execute companywide strategy more effectively, although that will depend on whether the new leaders are evaluated on and rewarded for cooperation.

Six managers will lead the technology groups:

Qi Lu, former head of Microsoft’s consumer-facing Online Services division, will continue to lead engineering for the consumer online services such as Bing. He will now also manage engineering for business applications such as Office and Exchange and related hosted services such as Office 365 that were formerly developed and marketed by the disbanded Office division. Kurt DelBene, former head of the Office division, is leaving the company.