Microsoft has just announced the departure of Platforms and Services division president Kevin Johnson and the reorganization of the division into two new business units, Windows/windows live and Online Services. Johnson, according to the Wall Street Journal, will be taking the helm at Juniper Networks, and the two new business unit heads will report directly to Steve Ballmer.

I was just listening to audio from Todd Bishop's Q&A with Mary Jo Foley last night in Redmond, in which she expressed a desire to see the company split up a bit... I am not sure this is what she had in mind but it is certainly a shake up for the most significant segment of the company.

Considering Ballmer's rather suspect decisions of late (the Yahoo deal most prominent among them) it's questionable as to whether it's a good idea for him to be directly involved at an even lower level in the business. However, considering the timing and aspect of Johnson's move, it seems almost certain that it was a surprise to the company and may have resulted in some knee-jerk decisions which will later come back to haunt them.

Speaking of Todd Bishop, he has obtained the full text of an e-mail sent to employees by Ballmer and posted it here. There are no real surprises in the message, which soft-pedals both the re-org and Johnson's departure (and indeed, re-orgs even at this scale are hardly a novelty in Redmond) and presents an upbeat overview of the company's strategic position and focus for the coming year.

Although Johnson has held a position with significant responsibility over the Windows realm for some time, I doubt this will have much impact on the division. Steven Sinofsky, who Foley describes in her Q&A as "the man who makes the trains run on time" continues as head of the Windows/Windows Live Engineering Unit and unless Ballmer manages to derail things somehow, Windows 7 will no doubt continue on pace for a 2009/10 delivery. The only remaining question is how this will effect the online services component of the company, which is already floundering and whose staff, already demoralized at the suggestion that Yahoo need be acquired because they couldn't beat Google on their own, are unlikely to welcome Ballmer's closer supervision with open arms.