14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s major reorganization announced earlier this year continues quietly within the company, and a new report reveals some of the changes that CEO Satya Nadella is making in order to support the push for cross-platform experiences.
ZDNet reveals that Microsoft Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore, who was appointed chief of the Windows client experiences team as part of the April reorganization, will also be in charge of Education, OneNote, and Wunderlist/To-Do. All these divisions have most recently operated under the supervision of Corporate Vice President Eran Megiddo.
The cited source speculates that the new responsibilities for Joe Belfiore are an indication of Microsoft’s increasing focus on the cross-platform strategy. The software giant wants to expand in the iOS and Android ecosystems, and by putting Joe Belfiore at the head of all these teams should help support this plan.
Streamlining consumer units
In addition, it looks like Microsoft integrated the Skype consumer team in the Outlook division, with Gaurav Sareen, who has until now been the head of the Outlook, Yammer, and Office 365 Groups teams to be in charge of the Skype consumer unit as well.
Microsoft hasn’t publicly announced these changes, but at some level, they do make sense, as they appear to streamline the company’s consumer focus and fuel the cross-platform push that the software giant is going for these days.
The Redmond-based software giant itself has tried to make some of its consumer-focused products available cross-platform for several years already, and this strategy has more or less caused criticism from the Windows community.
Today, for instance, Microsoft started testing Windows Timeline support in Microsoft Edge on iOS, and it’s believed the same feature will arrive on Android as well. Windows Timeline is a feature of Windows 10 Redstone 4, while Microsoft Edge itself is the new default browser of its operating system, now also available on rival mobile platforms.