Microsoft Names 2 Office Leaders to Replace Sinofsky

Instead of replacing the former head of its Office engineering team with one person, Microsoft has decided to split Office leadership duties in two, the company said Wednesday.

To lead Office development and engineering, Microsoft has formed two new groups, the Office Productivity Applications group and the Office Business Platform group, each with its own top manager. Antoine Leblond will lead the former group as corporate vice president, while Kurt DelBene will take on the same role of the latter group.

The development and design of the main Office client applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook will fall under Leblond’s division, while DelBene will oversee Office products SharePoint Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Content Management Server, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Project Server, Microsoft SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Groove, the company said.

In March, Microsoft announced then-Senior Vice President of Office Steven Sinofsky would take on a new role in its Platforms and Services Division to oversee the engineering of the Windows client OS.

Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, unveiled the changes to the Office team and Microsoft top executives Wednesday. Microsoft did not give a reason for the decision, saying only in a statement that it “concluded that the organization would benefit from a slightly different model for Office engineering leadership moving forward.”

-Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

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