Leaked memo: The head of Microsoft's fast-growing Teams chat app is retiring, as Microsoft merges the Windows and hardware groups in a major reorg

• Microsoft notified employees Wednesday about a big reorganization the affecting Windows and Devices businesses.
• Business Insider obtained a leaked email Microsoft Executive Vice President of Experiences and Devices Rajesh Jha sent to employees on Wednesday.
• The head of Microsoft's fast-growing Teams chat app is retiring.
• The shakeup, effective Feb. 25, includes a big reorganization to merge the Windows Experience team and the Devices organization to become the Windows + Devices Team.
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The head of Microsoft's fast-growing Teams chat app is retiring, amid a huge shakeup to the company's Windows and Device business, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.

The shakeup, effective Feb. 25, includes a broad reorganization that will merge the Windows Experience team and the Devices organization to become a unified Windows + Devices Team, reporting to Panos Panay.

"The Windows + Devices Team will drive end-to-end people centered innovation including the entire Windows ecosystem," Microsoft Executive Vice President of Experiences and Devices Rajesh Jha said in the email sent to employees on Wednesday. "The joining of these teams will streamline the decision-making process to help us deliver the best device experience from silicon through the OS for our customers on OEM and Surface Devices."

Brian MacDonald - the executive who runs Microsoft Teams chat app - is retiring and SharePoint and OneDrive chief Jeff Teper will take over the organization.

"Brian has created multiple product categories - starting as the founder of modern project management in Microsoft Project, bringing together email and personal information management as the founder of Microsoft Outlook and more recently with Microsoft Teams - the fastest growing business application that is a modern productivity hub," Jha wrote.

MacDonald is known as the "father of Outlook," Microsoft's email product. He helped Microsoft develop Teams by taking a small group of engineers to his fruit plantation in Maui.

"In-between writing lines of code, the team spent their days hiking, riding tractors, picking food from the land, all to inspire new ways of thinking about the essence of teamwork, how technology can take collaboration to new levels, and what Microsoft could uniquely offer," Microsoft has said of the creation of Teams. "By the end, they left with the crystallizing idea that they wanted to build a service that made it frictionless for individuals and teams to create, collaborate and 'work in the open.'"

Teams has more than 20 million daily active users, according to Microsoft - more than rival Slack, although Slack has taken issue with Microsoft's accounting since Teams comes automatically within Microsoft 365.

Teper, meanwhile, is known as the "father of Sharepoint." He's corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud-based suite of productivity tools.

Teper joined Microsoft in 1992 and runs design, product and engineering for products including core Office applications such as Word and Excel, OneDrive file storage system and collaboration platform SharePoint.

Microsoft has yet to respond to a request for more information.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley earlier reported details of the Windows and Devices reorg.

As part of the reorganization, Joe Belfiore and Ales Holecek will lead Microsoft's Office/Office Experience Group team "as a product/engineering duo," Jha said.

Kirk Koenigsbauer, who Jha said has been running Microsoft 365 product marketing and our customer solution areas for Modern Workplace and Security, will report to me directly to Jha as the chief operating officer for Experiences and Devices.

Emma Williams will now directly report to Jha and join the Experience and Devices leadership team and continuing running the Office Verticals team and the Workplace Intelligence team from Microsoft 365.