Microsoft has announced a fundamental restructuring of its office division. In a very surprising step, the head of the “Business Network” LinkedIn will also take over the management of the teams behind Office.
LinkedIn CEO will also head office teams in the future
As Microsoft announced today, the Office team will receive a new boss. In the future, the division will be headed by Ryan Roslansky, who has been head of the job portal and business network LinkedIn, who has been bought by Microsoft a few years earlier, since 2020. It should keep his position as a LinkedIn CEO, but at the same time also lead the Microsoft Office department.
In the future, Roslansky will be responsible for the teams who work on Office and the associated products such as Word, Excel, Outlook and online services from the office area. Roslansky will report directly to Rajesh Jha, who also directs the Windows and Business software divisions at Microsoft in a senior engineering position. As a LinkedIn boss, Roslansky remains subordinate to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Office becomes a vehicle for AI services
Microsoft said on the subject that the changeover does not initiate the end of Office or LinkedIn as independent products. Instead, the group probably tries primarily to take into account the changes triggered by the introduction of more and more services in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and to reorganize its business areas accordingly. In the course of the broad introduction of ever more AI functions than pure productivity tools, Office is likely to become significantly more important.
In the past, Word used Word to write documents of all kinds, Excel for the creation and processing of tables and PowerPoint for the design of presentations, such manual tasks will increasingly be taken over by AI services and largely automated in the future. The positioning of Office within Microsoft should therefore change significantly, which is why it seems sensible for the software giant to consider the product range more as a kind of collection of different AI services, which is now to be processed by the head of a web platform.
