The month of January has been marked with some significant departures from Microsoft. While this is certainly not a shakeup by any means, several key executives have left the company for various reasons.
Earlier this month, Brad Anderson, who was known for his significant social media presence and video series for Microsoft 365, left the company and headed to Qualtrics. And also this month it was announced Julia White was leaving Microsoft to head to SAP as well.
Building on those announcements, Microsoft has also informed employees today that Kurt DelBene, a CVP at the company will retire in January. DelBene joined Microsoft in 1992 and has served in various roles across the company and was most recently leading corporate strategy and core services engineering – he will remain officially an employee until the end of the fiscal year to help with the transition.
With this departure, the Core Services Engineering, Digital Security, and Risk Engineering will transition to Scott Guthrie’s org and the business operations will move to Finance under the leadership of Amy Hood. Finally, corporate strategy will move to Chris Young’s Business Development org.
While individually, none of these exits point to any significant issues inside the company, the net result will be a sizeable overhaul to how the company operates in the areas that each of these executives operated within.
Is this a bad thing for Microsoft? Only time will tell but given how well Microsoft has navigated the pandemic, it’s clear that each of these executives knew how to run their respective organizations and that loss will be felt across the company.
But with each exit, comes the opportunity for new leaders to step up and make their impression on the organization.
Tomorrow, Microsoft will report their calendar Q4, fiscal year Q2 earnings. It is expected that they will once again turn a significant profit but we will have to wait and see the finer details of how each business unit performed during the holiday quarter.