Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has decided Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar, and shifted Charlie Bell, the company’s executive veep for security, into the new role.
Nadella announced the new job and Bell’s appointment in an internal memo he shared on the Microsoft blog.
“Charlie built our Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management organization and helped rally the company behind the Secure Future Initiative,” Nadella wrote, referencing a “Quality Excellence Initiative” that has “increased accountability and accelerated progress against our engineering objectives to ensure we always deliver durable, high-quality experiences at global scale.”
Nadella’s post doesn’t say why Microsoft needs someone to focus on engineering quality at this time.
Surely it couldn’t be because Microsoft uses AI to write 30 percent of its own code?
Maybe Bell’s needed to stop Azure outages or reduce the quantity of Windows patches that break the OS instead of fixing it? Or perhaps Nadella needs a lieutenant to do something about Microsoft’s recent out-of-band patch spree, or come up with uses for AI that excite more than the 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who are willing to pay for Copilot?
Whatever Bell gets to do, he reports directly to Nadella. Work In Progress meetings could be fun!
The CEO’s post also reveals that Microsoft has lured Hayete Gallot, Google Cloud’s president for customer experience, to the company.
Gallot spent just 18 months at Google, having previously spent 15 years rising through the ranks at Redmond to become a corporate vice president, and according to Nadella, played “multiple critical roles in building two of our biggest franchises – Windows and Office” before becoming “instrumental in the design and implementation of our Security Solution Area.”
She returns to Microsoft as the executive vice president responsible for security.
Nadella said these appointments address “two of our core priorities: security and quality.”
But it is unclear if that means improving the security of Microsoft’s wares, or selling more security products because his post refers to improved sales rather than stamping out shabby software like the flaws which allowed total domain compromise of Exchange, or the mess that allowed Chinese actors to read sensitive government emails. ®