Panos In, Joe B Out (Premium)

As part of a massive reorg, Microsoft has put Panos Panay in charge of Windows and has bounced Joe Belfiore over to Office. If you care at all about Windows, this is a great move, as Microsoft is finally dealing with two of its biggest mistakes of the past few years.

The first, of course, is that with the removal of Terry Myerson as the head of Windows—who failed by succeeding at the terrible task given to him by CEO Satya Nadella—Microsoft put this once formidable product into a tailspin with no direct leadership and, as bad, no direct representation on Nadella’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT). With Panos in charge of Windows now, that first transgression has been reversed, though Windows is still not directly represented on the SLT.

The second mistake was that it put too much deadwood behind its half-hearted efforts to improve the so-called “experiences” in Windows 10. The results speak for themselves: A bunch of useless features no one uses, numerous promised features that have never shipped and have just quietly disappeared, and a silly Collections feature baked into Edge that should have been implemented as an extension. And let’s not overlook the Windows Insider program, which needs a massive overhaul and some adult supervision.

That said, these two changes—which are only part of a massive reorg that Mary Jo Foley wrote about earlier today—are not necessarily all good news.

First, Panay’s elevation was apparently Microsoft’s response to news that he had been interviewing at Apple, no doubt to take over that firm’s floundering Mac business. I happen to love the guy, but Panay was already controversial enough, given that many don’t like his awkward presentation style and his sometimes strange product decisions (like the slow embrace of USB-C, for example, and Alcantara). That he was actively shopping himself around to Surface’s chief competitor, a company that makes products he endlessly compares his own to, should be a bit unnerving to fans.

There is also a small related worry that Panay is one of the last and only holdouts from the Sinofsky era. Anyone who remembers how terribly that era went knows that Sinofsky was incredibly divisive and that he essentially sent Windows into the nosedive we’ve been dealing with every since thanks to Windows 8 and its insane focus on “touch-first” experiences and non-traditional PC form factors and use cases. The good news is that Panay succeeded in the post-Sinofsky Microsoft for a reason, and Microsoft no longer has any stomach for revolutionary changes to Windows. So I don’t think we need to worry about any negative impact from that relationship.

And then there’s Joe.

Joe B. is beloved by the community, so his reappointment to Office might be seen as the equivalent to being sent to Siberia; on Windows, his feature additions, when they happened, could have real impact, but on Office, he’d just be lost in the sea of new features that that business ships every single month. Joe himself seems to see it that way, too, since he’s taking a second leave of absence from Microsoft, and I assume that he’ll be shopping his services around now too. Hey Joe, I hear Apple could use some help with the Mac.

Kidding. But it’s likely that Belfiore will simply leave Microsoft. I had heard that was the original plan during his previous leave of absence, and I was surprised when he came back. This might be the final straw.

Looked at more broadly, the pressure is on for Nadella to justify his anti-Windows stance and his over-emphasis on cloud services that, frankly, have still not unseated the firm’s traditional businesses. After all, Windows was revealed this past quarter to still be Microsoft’s biggest revenue generator. Why has Microsoft ignored it for so long?

I don’t know, and while these changes don’t mean the overall strategy has changed, I do think they represent an acknowledgment, if somewhat implicit, that perhaps Microsoft tried to move past Windows a bit too aggressively. And that it needs some oversight, and some nurturing, from someone with real leadership skills.

So we’ll see what happens. But overall, I see both of these changes as a net positive for Windows. And that is all I care about.