Julie Larson-Green, the Microsoft executive who co-led Windows development as recently as last summer and now heads the company's hardware efforts, will move to the group responsible for Office, where she once worked, according to an internal email obtained by the website GeekWire.
Her change of jobs was likely triggered by promises made last September, when former CEO Steve Ballmer said that Stephen Elop, the then-CEO of Nokia, would rejoin Microsoft after the $7.4 billion acquisition of the Finnish company's handset business to head an expanded devices group at Redmond.
On one hand, Larson-Green's departure from the Devices and Studios Group, one of four broad-based engineering divisions created after the 2013 "One Microsoft" reorganization launched by Ballmer, was not a surprise because of Elop's imminent arrival.
But last year, in a company-wide email after the Nokia acquisition announcement, Ballmer said that Larson-Green would continue to work in devices. "Julie will be joining Stephen [Elop]'s team once the acquisition closes, and will work with him to shape the new organization," Ballmer wrote at the time.
GeekWire first reported Monday on Larson-Green's job change and published an email she sent to Microsoft employees. According to the email, Larson-Green will report to Qi Lu, the executive who runs the Applications and Services Group, where she will serve as chief experience officer for a team within that group.
Lu's group is in charge of not only Office, but also some of Microsoft's most important services, including Bing, OneDrive, Outlook.com and Skype.
Until then, Larson-Green will continue to head the division responsible for the Surface tablet line and Xbox, and for outside video game titles.
The change would have to be considered a demotion in that Larson-Green is a member of the company's senior leadership team, a group that includes the heads of the four main engineering divisions as well as COO Kevin Turner, CFO Amy Hood and former Skype CEO Tony Bates, an executive vice president in charge of business development and evangelism. They all report directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
In the email, Larson-Green's future title was not expressed as an executive vice president, the level that makes up the leadership team immediately under Nadella. Instead, she will report to Lu, who does have that title.
Larson-Green will be returning to the group responsible for Office, where she worked for several years as a lieutenant to Steven Sinofsky, the former head of Office who was later promoted to lead Windows development but was ousted from the company in November 2012, just weeks after the launch of Windows 8.
Larson-Green was instrumental in the design of Office 2007's most striking feature, a "Ribbon" in Microsoft Word that exposed more of the program's features. Although criticism of the Ribbon was initially sharp, most users -- but not all -- grew comfortable with the change from the long-time Windows-style menu structure. The Ribbon was later extended to other applications in the Office suite and to some of the programs baked into Windows, like the Windows Explorer file manager.