Three New Presidents at Microsoft

Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, named three new presidents for the Microsoft Office Division, Mobile Communications Business and Interactive Entertainment Business, and also separated the gaming and mobile units.

As of October 1st, Kurt DelBene is the new president of the Microsoft Office Division, Don Mattrick is president of the Interactive Entertainment Business and Andy Lees – president of the Mobile Communications Business.

Steve Ballmer said in his e-mail to Microsoft’s employees that these “promotions underscore the strength of Microsoft’s collective leadership team and set us up well to execute against a powerful lineup of products this fall.”

“Not only is the team ready to capitalize on major momentum with our existing products like Office, SharePoint and Halo: Reach, but they are simultaneously bringing entirely new experiences to market with Windows Phone 7 and Kinect for Xbox 360,” he added.

Microsoft promoted Kurt DelBene, who previously led the Microsoft Business Division engineering and development teams, including the development of the recently launched Office 2010 products and services, to the head of the Microsoft Office Division.

He takes the place of Steven Elop, who recently left Microsoft to run Nokia, and as president he will assume responsibility for the Microsoft Office Division, with both the engineering and marketing functions for clients, servers and services for information workers, as well as Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, Visio and Microsoft’s speech technology investment.

Andy Lees is now the new president of the Mobile Communications Business, and, at 45, he will continue to supervise the marketing and product development for the company's mobile business.

He has been working at Microsoft for 20 years now, and has been leading the Mobile Communications Business since February 2008.

Finally, Ballmer named Don Mattrick as president of the Interactive Entertainment Business, where he will continue to supervise a wide range of businesses and services, centered on consumer entertainment, which include Xbox 360, Xbox LIVE, Kinect, Zune Music and Video, and Mediaroom, as well as PC and mobile interactive entertainment.

Also, Kirill Tatarinov will continue to oversee Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) and will report to Steve Ballmer, not DelBene.

So it appears that there are now six Microsoft presidents: Kurt DelBene, Andy Lees, Don Mattrick, Steven Sinofsky, Bob Muglia and Qi Lu.