Terry Myerson, VP of Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft, is leaving as part of a company-wide reorg; Surface chief Panos Panay becomes chief product officer
Microsoft's latest company reorg includes some major changes to its Windows and Devices organization, including the departure of its current leader, Terry Myerson.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2018 reorg ends Terry Myerson's run leading the combined Windows and Devices Group and hands the chief product officer title to Panos Panay, who had already been expanding his remit since taking over engineering for premium devices including Surface, Xbox, and HoloLens in 2015. It is the moment Surface's chief moves from hardware to company-wide product authority.
The arc that follows validates how consequential this promotion was: Panay used the expanded role to push through the 2020 merger of Windows software and hardware teams into one Devices + Windows group, before his own abrupt 2023 exit led Microsoft to split the groups again and name Pavan Davuluri Windows and Surface chief in a March 2024 memo.
First-order effects
- Myerson departs and the Windows and Devices Group loses its single leader, while Panay's authority jumps from Surface to all of Microsoft's product output under the new CPO title.
Second-order effects
- With one executive owning both Windows and devices, the organizational pressure points that produced the 2020 Devices + Windows consolidation become visible early — hardware and software roadmaps now report up the same chain.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across the corpus: this org keeps being redrawn around whoever holds it — merged under Panay in 2020, split after his 2023 departure, and handed to Davuluri in 2024 — making Windows-and-Surface leadership at Microsoft a recurring structural lever rather than a settled structure.
The trend: Microsoft's Windows and devices organization has spent years cycling between unified and split structures, with each reorganization concentrating or dispersing power around a single product executive.