Microsoft reorganises Office Group products; Word and PowerPoint to combine

Microsoft has done some major reshuffling on its Office unit to get together products that perform the same or similar functions, rather than having different task-specific individual products. Microsoft’s chief experience officer for applications and services group, Julie Larson-Green said at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco that Microsoft wants people to focus on the task at hand rather than the tools to do those tasks. “The idea is to enable company to think more broadly and more deeply about the future of those technology areas and the future of that kind of content creation rather than focusing so much on the individual applications themselves,” said Larson-Green. To this effect, Microsoft will combine PowerPoint, Word and Sway interactive-presentation app - which are generally tools for content creation. Data and analytics tools such as Excel spreadsheets and Access databases will be combined as well. Speaking about Microsoft’s just announced acquisition of LinkedIn , Larson-Green said that it was an exciting opportunity to take LinkedIn’s big professional network and combine it with Microsoft’s big professional cloud network.