Happy Friday! Let’s kick the weekend off a bit early and try to forget or ignore that AI is eating everything we care about.
🛳️ Shuffling the deck chairs?
SeattleMike asks:
What are your thoughts on the recent (massive) re-org within Microsoft and its impact on the future of Windows? Any feedback from employees? How’s it going over internally?
At the end of September, Microsoft moved all of Windows engineering under a single organization run by Pavan Davuluri, who had recently been promoted from corporate vice president to president. Davuluri came up out of Surface, though I had never heard of him until he took over Windows + Devices in 2023 after Panos Panay left the company. He seems like a better choice to run this business than Panay, but he has also weathered some mini-controversies, most notably the botched Recall launch in mid-2024.
To me, there are two things going on with the reorg at a high level. The most obvious is that Davuluri is bringing Windows Server back into the same organization as Windows client. And the second is that Davuluri clearly has two qualities his predecessor lacked: Technical skill and a real vision for the future of Windows.
When we first learned about the reorg, we knew that it was about remaking Windows with agentic AI capabilities, but there was also a misunderstanding about the scope of the reorg. That is, while “Windows engineering work” was unified under Davuluri, the “core kernel,” virtualization, and Linux remain in the Azure organization. So Davuluri did not take control of the low-level, foundational parts of Windows as I had thought.
No one here should be excited or care in the slightest that Windows Client and Server are or are not under one roof. But Davuluri does oversee the Core OS, Data Intelligence and Fundamentals, Security, and Engineering Systems teams now, rather than sharing much of that with Azure. And that is important because the shift to “Windows as an Agentic OS” will require a lot more engineering/computer science work than painting a thin veneer of a new look and feel on top of Windows, as Panay did with Windows 11. This is real work, not superficial aesthetics.
Tied to this, Yusuf Mehdi, who is an executive vice president now and consumer chief marketing officer, has been making the rounds doing press briefings and interviews to help sell this effort. I mention the marketing bit because he has routinely repeated the claim that Microsoft “rewrote” Windows “from the ground up” when it created Copilot+ PC and that it’s doing that again as it transitions Windows to an agentic OS. That claim is ludicrous because nothing of the sort happened. But it’s fair to say that there is now a lot of deep technical work happening, the type of thing that wasn’t the focus under Panay, and that that’s what Mehdi is oversimplifying. Between the Windows Resiliency Initiative and now these platform-level AI capabilities that go far beyond apps …
