As Microsoft’s fiscal year draws to a close the company has announced a reshuffle and bids farewell to some of its big execs, including CEO candidate before Nadella’s arrival,  former Nokia head Stephen Elop. Also leaving Redmond will be Kirill Tatarinov, executive vice president of the Microsoft Business Solutions Group; Mark Penn, chief insights officer (and of course the man behind the Google-bashing ‘Scroogled’ campaign),  and Eric Rudder, chief of advanced technology and education at Microsoft.

Executive vice president Terry Myerson will lead a new team, the Windows and Devices Group, that will be a combination of the Operating Systems Group and Microsoft Devices Group formerly led by Elop. This essentially makes him the main man at Microsoft under Nadella’s leadership, in charge of pushing Windows across all devices form HoloLens to Xbox. Steve Guthrie will remain the Cloud and Enterprise boss, but that will also include taking over Dynamics business apps. Qi Lu will still lead the Applications and Services Group with the added job of building solutions for education.

In an email to Microsoft employees Nadella said that the move was to better align the company in place with his own mobile-first, cloud-first strategy. This is not the first time Nadella has reshuffled the deck at Microsoft – a company that has seen its fair share of in-fighting – in the hope of making things run more smoothly.

Nadella stated in the email that he had nothing but the utmost respect for the dearly departed, whose list of achievements at Redmond he duly noted. He also said he was counting on the new assignations to lead Microsoft into its promised land. “Our competition and our customers don’t care about our organization structure — they care about innovation,” said Nadella, adding, “While we are distinctly aligning our engineering structure and core capabilities, our ambitions are interconnected. Success requires all of us — and particularly the Senior Leadership Team — to work across boundaries as one Microsoft and in harmony with our partners.”

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