Eye On Microsoft: The Giant Stirs From Slumber

Eastside software magnates Microsoft have been taking public hits recently as they attempted to sue an executive into staying put in his Redmond office, but it looks like the poor soul's successfully escaped to Google. It doesn't take a courtroom drama for Seattle to know what the tone has been like at Microsoft lately - We can hear the chair throwing echoing over the water and our friends and loved ones who reverse commute to the campus have been wearing plastic smiles for weeks. This excludes the Xbox 360 people who at least get to do something cool while they bleed money.

Yesterday Steve Ballmer announced publicly that there will be some changes over there, unfortunately they have nothing to do with the tragic towel situation. Conventional wisdom outside of Microsoft has long held that the company would have been better off had the Justice Deptartment split the operating system and applications branches apart, but until now the reaction from inside has been to squeeze the two closer and closer together. Ballmer announced that Microsoft will be splitting into three separate, supposedly autonomous divisions headed by their own presidents. The Mini Microsoft blog greets the reorg news with tenuous optimism:

At a high level, the reorg appears to be musical chairs at our to be very, very well compensated executive level that really don't have a lot of impact on the hard work of designing, implementing, and testing great products. Now's just a fine time for ripping through some of these orgs and unleashing our old-time promoted-up-through-the-ranks Microsofties into our more dubious product groups just to get them back on track or out of here. But right now, I have zero idea how this affects anyone other than those few individuals mentioned in the reorg today. I have hopes, but not much more.