Microsoft Unveils Dramatic Restructuring Today

Image via Flickr/ The CBI

Microsoft has finally unveiled its dramatic corporate restructuring this Thursday. Ballmer has sent out a memo this morning entitled “One Microsoft” in regards to the restructuring, and he plans to address the company at a meeting this morning to discuss his final plans in detail.

In the memo—which has an underlying theme of unity—Ballmer writes, “Today’s announcement will enable us to execute even better on our strategy to deliver a family of devices and services that best empower people for the activities they value most and the enterprise extensions and services that are most valuable to business.”

The overall goal for Ballmer is to create “functional coherence” within the company and reorganizing around services and devices in both the business and consumer sectors.

How we organize our engineering efforts will also change to reflect this strategy,” he wrote in a memo. “We will pull together disparate engineering efforts today into a coherent set of our high-value activities. This will enable us to deliver the most capability —and be most efficient in development and operations—with the greatest coherence to all our key customers. We will plan across the company, so we can better deliver compelling integrated devices and services for the high-value experiences and core technologies around which we organize. This new planning approach will look at both the short-term deliverables and long-term initiatives needed to meet the shipment cadences of both Microsoft and third-party devices and our services.”

One concerned insider told AllThingsD, ““If this is all about an org chart and not how to build great products, it does not matter what org chart Ballmer presents. Consumers buy products, not a management structure.”

Ballmer plans to reorganize the company by functions: “Engineering (including supply chain and datacenters), Marketing, Business Development and Evangelism, Advanced Strategy and Research, Finance, HR, Legal, and COO (including field, support, commercial operations and IT).”

A major portion of the restructuring is said to focus on shifting employee positions, which he also noted in his memo. He announced the departure of Kurt DelBene, who was the president of the Microsoft Office Division and responsible for driving global productivity strategy for information workers.

For help on restructuring, Ballmer turned to Ford CEO Alan Mulally, who has been a source of great advice for companies realigning their strategy. When Mulally was listed in the TIME magazine top 100 in 2009, Ballmer wrote about him, saying, ““[Mulally] understands the fundamentals of business success as well as any business leader I know.”

At the end of Ballmer’s memo, he reminded his employees that, despite the change in company structure, principals would remain the same. “Lots of change,” he wrote. “But in all of this, many key things remains the same. Our incredible people, our spirit, our commitment, our belief in the transformative power of technology — our Microsoft technology — to make the world a better place for billions of people and millions of businesses around the world. It’s why I come to work inspired every day. It’s why we’ve evolved before, and why we’re evolving now. Because we’re not done.

Let’s go.”