Microsoft has announced the departure of Stephen Elop, the former Nokia CEO who headed to Seattle along with the Finnish vendor’s handset business in 2013.
Elop was made executive vice president of Microsoft’s devices unit and was rumoured to be…
Microsoft has announced the departure of Stephen Elop, the former Nokia CEO who headed to Seattle along with the Finnish vendor’s handset business in 2013.
Elop was made executive vice president of Microsoft’s devices unit and was rumoured to be in the frame to succeed the software giant’s CEO Steve Ballmer.
That role instead went to Satya Nadella, who announced the departure of Elop in an email to Microsoft’s employees yesterday.
Nadella laid out changes to the group’s senior leadership team to “drive engineering alignment against the company’s core ambitions: reinvent productivity and business processes, build the intelligent cloud platform, and create more personal computing”.
Terry Myerson, who heads up Microsoft’s operating systems division, will assume Elop’s responsibilities. Myerson will lead a newly formed team called Windows and devices group.
The change marks the end of Elop’s second stint at Microsoft. Before joining Nokia in 2010, Elop had led Microsoft’s business division for two years. Prior to that he spent a year as COO of Juniper Networks.
Nokia hired Elop to turn around its fortunes, but the firm’s share price continued to fall. However, the sale of Nokia’s handset business to Microsoft was viewed as a success.
