In this day and age where large-scale corporate mergers are happening every couple of months, The Corporation is splitting up. Here’s the skinny from the press release:
Microsoft Corp. today announced a realignment of the company into three newly formed divisions, each of which will be led by its own president.
The three new spinoffs will each have their own stock options and their own names, although the full transition to the smaller, more agile units will take well over a year to complete. The big chunk is obviously the Operating-System division, which will continue development of both the upcoming Vista edition of Windows and the current Media Center and PocketPC platforms. The second chunk will handle Microsoft’s Business Products, which includes Office, Visual Studio and all their productivity tools. The third and final chunk will be Entertainment & Devices, which basically means the XBox, and additionally their keyboards, mice and media services such as PlaysForSure.
This is one interesting development and kinda echoes what happened to Palm two years ago when they spun-off their OS division (although that move turned out to be ill-advised given that PalmSource is currently languishing in obscurity). We won’t really find out until about 2007 just how bad a move MS’s split-up actually is though.