Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, talks about Windows 11 at the Windows 11 launch event that was streamed live on June 24, 2021.
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft’s product chief, Panos Panay, will leave the software and hardware maker, executive vice president Rajesh Jha told employees on Monday.
The shakeup represents a changing of the guard after more than a decade of sales of Microsoft’s Surface PCs, which Panay has presented to consumers at company events. Surface sales have failed to keep up with the growth of cloud services, and Windows, a source of profitable revenue, has yet to return to growth after the pandemic kicked off a buying frenzy.
But the company isn’t giving up on these two areas.
“We remain steadfast and convicted in our strategy and Yusuf Mehdi will take lead on our Windows and Surface businesses and products externally,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. Mehdi, who joined Microsoft in 1992, is Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer.
As part of the changes, Charles Simonyi, who led the development of Microsoft’s popular Word and Excel applications, is joining the management teams for the Experiences and Devices group that Jha is is in charge of, Jha wrote in his memo to employees. Simonyi, now 75, rejoined Microsoft in 2017 as a technical fellow as the company acquired his startup Intentional Software.
“Our commitment to Surface and MR remains unchanged,” Jha wrote, referring to mixed reality, a category that includes Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality devices.
Leadership changes involving Panos’ departure will take effect immediately, just three days before Microsoft holds an event in New York where the company is expected to announce its next generation of Surface devices.
After 10 years on the market, Surface had failed to gain more than a few percentage points of market share in PC shipments, although device designs have inspired other device makers that sell Windows machines. Microsoft picks up revenue from licenses sold to these device makers.
Panay joined Microsoft in 2004 as a group program manager on PC software. He took on additional leadership of Windows, the world’s leading PC operating system, starting in 2020. And since 2021, he has been part of the company’s senior leadership team. He has not yet announced his future plans.
“After 19 incredible years at Microsoft, I’ve decided to turn the page and write the next chapter,” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “I’m forever grateful for my time at Microsoft and the amazing people I had the honor to make products with.”
Read the full memo below.
Team,
After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft. Panos has had an incredible impact on our products and culture as well as the broader devices ecosystem. Under Panos’ leadership, the team created the iconic Surface brand with loved products. More recently, as the leader of Windows, the team has brought amazing services and experiences to hundreds of millions with Windows 11 on innovative devices including those from our OEM partners. He will be missed, and I am personally very grateful for his many contributions over the years. Please join me in wishing him well.
Moving forward, we will double down on our strategy. These changes will be effective immediately with Panos’ help in the transition.
Build silicon, systems and devices that span Windows, client and cloud for an AI world. This team will be led by Pavan Davuluri, who will report directly to me. Brett Ostrum, Nino Storniolo, Linda Averett, Ken Pan, Ralf Groene, Aidan Marcuss, Carlos Picoto, Stevie Bathiche, Robin Seiler, Ruben Caballero and Anuj Gosalia will move to report to Pavan with their teams intact. Windows planning and release management will continue to be in this team. Our commitment to Surface and MR remains unchanged.
Build experiences that blend web, services and Windows for an AI world. To this end, Shilpa Ranganathan, Jeff Johnson and Ali Akgun will directly report to Mikhail Parakhin and form a new Windows and Web Experiences Team, moving with their teams intact.
Yusuf Mehdi will take on the responsibility of leading the Windows and Surface businesses with our OEM and Retail partners.
In addition, Charles Simonyi, Terri Chudzik and Erin Kolb will join the E+D management teams and Ralf Groene and Mike Davidson will work together on the best alignment on design teams.
We will set up time for an AMA in the coming days to answer questions. Let’s continue to stay focused on executing on our existing plans. Thank you for all that you do, and the impact that you have for our customers and partners.
Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, July 24, 2024.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Brazil’s supreme court announced Friday that it ordered banks to transfer funds from Starlink and X accounts to pay fines the court levied against Elon Musk’s social network.
The court’s top justice, Alexandre de Moraes, and a panel of five other justices, found that X had repeatedly violated Brazilian law when it refused to appoint a legal representative in the country, and when it refused to remove content or profiles from its platform that the court determined to be harmful towards democratic institutions in Brazil.
The court had nearly 18.4 million Brazilian reals, or approximately $3.3 million, transferred out of the accounts. Musk acquired X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. Starlink is the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.
Following the transfers, the court ordered that the frozen bank accounts and assets of X and Starlink be released, saying there was no longer any need to keep them.
The court suspended X at the end of August, and the suspension remains in place.
Musk and his businesses have said they view the actions of de Moraes as “illegal,” and his court’s orders as having been issued without due process. X and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.
Brazilian news agency UOL reported earlier this month that some of the accounts de Moraes ordered Musk to suspend at X belong to users who allegedly threatened federal police officers involved in a probe of former right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro has been accused of instigating Brazil’s Jan. 8 riots and of attempting to stage a coup there.
Musk is a proponent of Bolsonaro, in part because the former Brazilian president authorized his business Starlink to operate in the country.
Musk has been ramping up insults and calls to impeach de Moraes since April. On Sept. 5, his long-time collaborator at the helm of SpaceX, COO Gwynne Shotwell, also took shots at the Brazil supreme court online.
She wrote, “@Alexandre, please stop harassing Starlink and let us keep serving the people of Brazil.”
Backers of de Moraes and the STF have seen the orders against X Corp. as an assertion of Brazilian sovereignty.
A single-vehicle collision last month involving a Tesla Semi electric truck took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish and required aircraft to dump fire retardant overhead, according to a preliminary report on Friday from the National Transportation Safety Board.
The crash, which occurred on California’s Interstate 80 west of Lake Tahoe, is being investigated by the NTSB. CAL-Fire’s efforts put out the flames cooled the vehicle’s massive battery to keep it from reigniting and prevented the fire from spreading beyond the crash site, the NTSB said.
The Tesla truck, driven by an employee, was headed to the company’s battery factory in Sparks, Nevada, from a warehouse in Livermore, California, the report said. The incident closed down part of the I-80 for 15 hours.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk first showed off the Semi truck design at an event in November 2017, promising it would come to market in 2020. The company still hasn’t started producing the trucks in high volume, but it’s building out production lines at its Nevada facility.
“Preparation of Semi factory continues and is on track to begin production by end of 2025,” Tesla said in its second-quarter earnings report in July.
The NTSB report confirmed that Tesla’s driver assistance systems, which are marketed as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in the U.S., were not “operational” at the time of the Semi collision and fire.
Larry Ellison, chief technology officer of Oracle (L), and Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon.
Reuters
Oracle‘s best week on the stock market since 2021 has bolstered Chairman Larry Ellison’s net worth, briefly edging him past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Friday to become the world’s second-richest person.
Ellison’s net worth reached $208.4 billion shortly after the market open, then fell to $199 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. Bezos, who has claimed the title of world’s second-richest person on and off over the years, is worth $205 billion. Only Tesla CEO Elon Musk, at $252 billion, is currently above him.
Oracle shares gained 1.2% to $163.38 on Friday after the database vendor bumped up its fiscal 2026 revenue guidance and issued a rosy forecast as far out as fiscal 2029. The company issued the forward-looking revenue figures at its annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas.
The stock rallied 11% on Tuesday after the company reported quarterly results that topped expectations. Oracle shares continue to reach new highs and are now up about 56% this year, behind only artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia — up 139% — among large-cap tech stocks.
Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977, has been the biggest beneficiary of the boom. He owns about 40% of the outstanding stock, making him the company’s biggest stakeholder. His company’s revival in recent years has been sparked by its improving position in cloud infrastructure and growing adoption of its cloud databases.
Bezos, 60, and Ellison, 80, are jockeying for the title of world’s second-richest person three days after their companies forged a new partnership. On Monday, Oracle said its database software will become available for AWS customers to use atop Oracle hardware sitting inside of Amazon data centers.
Over the past year, Oracle has also forged similar partnerships with Microsoft and Google, the other two leading cloud infrastructure companies. Ellison told analysts on this week’s earnings call that Oracle is now in prime position in the cloud and in traditional data centers.
“With Oracle Database to be able to run AWS, Microsoft and Google, is incredibly important,” Ellison said on the call. “It will absolutely accelerate database growth in the public cloud. But we expect that private clouds will greatly outnumber public clouds as companies decide they don’t want — they want the Oracle Cloud behind their firewall, in their datacenter, with no neighbors.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Ari Levy contributed reporting.