January 16th, 2009
Microsoft moves Live Mesh under Windows chief Sinofsky
Microsoft still hasn’t gone public with rumored layoffs that many are expecting to happen in the next week or so. But it is doing what many expected: Rejiggering groups within various organizations as a way to tighten up the company.
This week’s example: Microsoft this week moved the Live Mesh team under the Windows and Windows Live engineering unit.
Live Mesh is Microsoft’s cross-platform synchronization and collaboration service that is currently in beta.
I asked Microsoft whether a tip I received that David Treadwell and his Live Services Platform team are no longer under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and received the following statement from a company spokesperson:
“The Windows Live, Live Services Platform, and Live Mesh teams will now be a part of the unified Windows Live organization under Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering. David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President, Live Services Platform, will now report to Sinofsky and will continue his work on the Live Services Platform.”
Sinofsky already owned Windows engineering prior to this move. The main change here is that Live Mesh is now part of Sinofsky’s org as well.
The spokesperson said there were no layoffs as a result of the move and that the change takes effect immediately.
According to Treadwell’s bio on the Microsoft site, the Live Services Platform team is charged with “defining and implementing the next generation of platform services that all Microsoft service-enabled applications and sites will use. These services include unified identity and directory, data synchronization, transport and presence, among others.”
(Live Services are part of Microsoft’s Azure platform. They are the layer of services that sit atop the Azure “Red Dog” operating system. Microsoft is retooling its own hosted services to run on top of the Azure platform, and is opening up the Azure platform to third-part developers.)
I’ve been wondering when and/or whether Microsoft plans at some point to make Live Mesh part of Windows — or at least part of the next version of the Live Essentials suite of services that is meant to “extend” Windows with services like Messenger, Mai, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, etc. Maybe my answer is “sooner rather than later.”
What do you make of Microsoft’s Live Mesh org-chart moves?
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