Microsoft Reorg - Steve Ballmer’s Memo to Employees

Thanks to Kara Swisher for digging up the memo from Steve Ballmer - Full Microsoft Steve Ballmer memo is here at Kara.AllThingsD (who had Steve Ballmer on stage at their lastest D conference). It clear that Microsoft is being aggressive and we’ll see how this turns out. They announced a reorg where the Platforms and Services Division will be split into two businesses: Windows/Windows Live and Online Services. Microsoft is announcing that Kevin Johnson will leave the company.

Here is Steve’s announcement on the new executives to led the split Platform and Services Division. “Effective immediately, Steven Sinofsky, Jon DeVaan, and Bill Veghte will report directly to me to lead Windows/Windows Live. In the Online Services Business, we will create a new senior leadership position and conduct a search that will span internal and external candidates. In the meantime, Satya Nadella will continue to lead Microsoft’s search, ad platform, and MSN engineering efforts, and Brian McAndrews will continue to lead the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group. Both Windows/Windows Live and the Online Services Business are led by a strong group of executives on the technical and business side who have the talent and experience to address the challenges we face and drive the next generation of growth and success. ”

I’m curious how this new strategy will shape Microsoft’s Unified Communications and Virtualization plan.

Notable quotes regarding Unified Communications and Virtualization.

Software plus services: Some people think software plus services is all about search. But it’s really about changing the way software is written and deployed. The future is about having a platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home. It’s also about driving change in business models through advertising, subscriptions, and online transactions. Software plus services is a huge opportunity for us to deliver new value on the desktop and the server to all of our customers. This year at PDC, you’ll hear more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies.

Business and enterprise: Our enterprise and server business has never been stronger—today we are on the verge of becoming the number one enterprise software company. We need to continue to push on all fronts—mail with Exchange, business intelligence with PerformancePoint, virtualization with Hyper-V, and databases with SQL Server. We have to drive our enterprise search capabilities, our unified communications solutions, and our collaboration technologies. And we must continue to compete against Linux in key workloads such as Web servers and high performance computing.