Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President of Microsoft's Windows and Devices Group, is leaving the company after 21 years of service. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the announcement in an employee memo on Thursday as part of a broader reorganization effort.

Nadella said that as Myerson readies for his next chapter outside of Microsoft, the two have been preparing for the transition, adding that Myerson has been "instrumental" in helping develop the new organizational structure.

The executive won't be leaving immediately, however, as he will stick around to assist with the transition "over the coming months."

As for the reorganization, it's quite extensive. Nadella said Rajesh Jha will expand his existing responsibilities and lead a new team that'll focus on experiences and devices. "The purpose of this team is to instill a unifying product ethos across our end-user experiences and devices," Nadella said.

Panos Panay, meanwhile, will now serve as Chief Product Officer. Joe Belfiore, Kudo Tsunoda and Brad Anderson will continue to lead the Windows, New Experiences and Technology and Enterprise Mobility and Management divisions, respectively.

Elsewhere, Scott Guthrie will add to his existing duties and lead a new team focused on Cloud + AI Platform. Nadella said the purpose of this team is to "drive platform coherence and compelling value across all layers of the tech stack starting with the distributed computing fabric (cloud and edge) to AI (infrastructure, runtimes, frameworks, tools and higher-level services around perception, knowledge and cognition)."

Microsoft is also making the following supporting leadership changes:

  • Azure: Jason Zander is being promoted to executive vice president, Azure, and will lead this team. The Windows platform team led by Harv Bhela, Henry Sanders and Michael Fortin will join Jason's team. Windows platform is already a core part of Azure across both the cloud and edge, and this shift will enable us to accelerate our efforts to build a unified distributed computing infrastructure and application model. Roanne Sones will continue to lead our technical engagement with OEMs, ODMs and silicon vendors, and her team will also join Jason's team.
  • Business AI: The Customer Service, Marketing and Sales Insights teams, previously led by Gurdeep Singh Pall, will join James Phillips' Business Applications Group. I am thankful for Gurdeep's leadership in building these new AI solutions that are going to help differentiate Microsoft in this area. This is a notable example of taking research breakthroughs to start new product efforts grounded in customer needs and then mainstreaming them.
  • Universal Store and Commerce Platform: Eric Lockard and his team will also join the Cloud + AI Platform team to both help with our own digital transformation and add new capabilities to our business application efforts.
  • AI Perception & Mixed Reality (MR): Alex Kipman will lead this new team, which brings together all our speech, vision, MR and additional perception capabilities into one team. This team will continue to build first-party products and the core building block cloud services for third parties on Azure. XD Huang, Yu-Ting Kuo and their teams will join this group, as well as Gurdeep's Ambient Intelligence team. Alex and team will take guidance on all AI-related areas from Harry Shum and work very closely with AI + Research (AI+R).
  • AI Cognitive Services & Platform: Eric Boyd will lead this new team and drive our AI Platform, AI Fundamentals, Azure ML, AI Tools and Cognitive Services. Joseph Sirosh and team will join this new group. Eric and team will take guidance on all AI-related areas from Harry Shum and work very closely with AI+R.

Additional changes can be gleamed from Nadella's memo.

This is a lot to digest as several facets of Microsoft are being altered. It's way too early to know exactly what sort of impact the changes will have but you can be sure there will be plenty of commentary on the reorganization in the coming days and weeks.

Lead image via Rectify Gaming