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BOOM! Stephen Elop shuffled out of Microsoft door

Redmond: 'We are aligning our engineering efforts'

Ex-Nokia chief Stephen Elop is officially out of Microsoft.

Redmond announced the cull of top execs at the software company in the past hour, and Elop is the most high-profile victim of the bloodletting.

Elop, Kirill Tatarinov and Eric Rudder will be leaving Microsoft following a handover period at the firm.

It means that the management team, led by CEO Satya Nadella, has been reshuffled.

Exec veep Terry Myerson will head a new wing of the biz, dubbed Windows and Devices Group (WDG). That division will bolt together Microsoft's current Operating System Group and MS Devices Group.

"We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions," Nadella said. "This change will enable us to deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace."

Redmond added that its chief insights officer AKA attack ads supremo Mark Penn was also quitting the company to "pursue another venture". He'll stand down from his post in September.

The management cull comes just before the end of Microsoft's financial year.

Microsoft turns it off and on again

It's lights out for Elop as power shifts elsewhere within the software company.

Microsoft told its staff this morning that it hoped to "reinvent productivity and business processes, build the intelligent cloud platform, and create more personal computing."

Myerson, in his role steering the newly-created WDG wing of the biz, will have more to juggle at Redmond. And it's worth noting that, in a significant cultural shift, MS will no longer have a team working solely on its operating system.

Meanwhile, top exec Scott Guthrie has retained his job heading up the firm's cloud and enterprise division. That said, changes (and – reading between the lines – possible job cuts) are afoot there, too.

Microsoft said:

The C+E team will also focus on building high-value infrastructure and business services that are key to managing business processes, especially in the areas of data and analytics, security and management, and development tools.

As a part of this announcement, the company will move the Dynamics development teams to the C+E team, enabling the company to accelerate ERP and CRM work and bring it into the mainstream C+E engineering and innovation efforts.

The restructuring of that division explains Tatarinov's exit from Microsoft.

Exec veep Qi Lu has the daunting task of "reinventing productivity services for digital work that span all devices" over at Microsoft's Applications and Services Group.

Here's the memo sent out to Microsoft staff on Wednesday morning.

Nadella said of Elop: "With the structural change described above, Stephen and I have agreed that now is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft. I regret the loss of leadership that this represents, and look forward to seeing where his next destination will be."

Ouch. ®

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