Does the latest shuffling of chairs at Redmond make any difference to Office users?
Microsoft has announced their latest corporate reorganization which has been analyzed to death in the press.
You can read the email to Microsoft staff here – and catch up on the latest in corporate buzzwords and platitudes at the same time. For example ‘dotted line report’ apparently means you report to an executive who does not have direct hire/fire/pay decision making ability for your job.
Office is part of the “Applications and Services Engineering Group” which includes Microsoft Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype, Bing and many other products.
What does it mean for Microsoft Office?
Very little really. Microsoft Office is already closely entwined with server technologies as a way to reinforce sales of both desktop and server products from Microsoft.
That group will have to work closely with the “Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group.” as Office moves to a cloud linked, cloud based and subscription service.
So from the customer’s standpoint there’ll be little change. Office’s trajectory will still be towards software rental and links to Microsoft cloud services.
A sidenote is that Skype is now part of the same corporate group as Office. Perhaps we’ll see some integration of Skype and Office which has been notably lacking until now.
