SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Microsoft announced Thursday changes to its Senior Leadership Team, following the departure of Qi Lu, who served the company as the Executive Vice President of Applications and Services Group. That position will be assumed by Rajesh Jha.
Lu is leaving the company due to health issues that arose from a bicycle accident that took place several months ago. He previously ran Microsoft’s search business and spent 10 years at Yahoo before joining Microsoft in 2008.
Lu was a favorite lieutenant under chief executive Satya Nadella, where he led the company’s effort to evolve Office from a desktop suite into a collection of apps and services that ran on mobile devices, including those running iOS and Android.
Jha is also going to be leading the new Office Product Group — where he’ll be reporting directly to company’s chief executive. Additionally, Microsoft’s Gurdeep Pall is transitioning the Skype team to Rajesh Jha’s Office Product Group as well.
In an internal email, Nadella wrote:
Rajesh Jha will step into the role of leading the Office Product Group reporting directly to me and joining the SLT starting today. Julie Larson-Green and Eran Megiddo will continue in their current and existing charters, reporting to Rajesh. Gurdeep Singh Pall and I have decided this is the right time for him to transition to his next role. Gurdeep will transition the Skype team to Rajesh over the coming weeks.
Microsoft is putting a lot of focus into artificial intelligence, and the company’s new Microsoft AI and Research Group is a perfect example of that. Five thousand of Microsoft’s employees will be working on the AI and Research Group, and that’s quite a huge investment, to say the least. It’s clear Nadella is betting big on artificial intelligence, and the outcome could potentially have a huge outcome for the software giant’s future.
