Microsoft, Famous for Culty Jargon, Is Naming Half Its Organization ‘Agents and Infra’

There’s the already irksome world of general purpose corporate jargon, and then there’s Microsoft, where dedication to saying things in a weird way borders on the religious. Add AI to the mix, and you get today’s news: According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will no longer be divided into these three passé reporting segments: Productivity and Business Processes Intelligent Cloud More Personal Computing Now the org chart will have just two hip, young divisions: Agents and Infra Devices and Consumer The Journal notes that according to CEO Satya Nadella, AI in particular is changing the structural boundaries within Microsoft. “Agents and Infra,” covers Microsoft’s AI models, GitHub, Azure (its cloud infrastructure division), and Microsoft 365, which is saturated with Copilot features. Meanwhile, “Devices and Consumer” covers Xbox and Windows, along with Microsoft’s search and advertising divisions, meaning things like Bing and LinkedIn. If you squint, the segments make sense to an outsider, but if you don’t squint they’re a tad murky and inconsistent. (Are Microsoft 365 and Windows really siloed off from one another?) But I’m sure from inside of Microsoft this all feels very natural and not weird at all. Toward the end of Steve Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, Ballmer (who is in the news today for unrelated reasons) famously tried to foster greater harmony within the fractured company by rolling out the culty term “One Microsoft,” a concept his successor, Nadella, is said to have worked toward achieving. Well there’s still one Microsoft, divided into two goofily named segments. Through the decades, the internal Microsoft slang that has crept out into the wider world has suggested a certain Ballmer-like zealotry, with the most famous example being “eating your own dogfood” or “dogfooding” to refer to using the software product you’re developing. The slang also sometimes just weird. For instance, Microsoft internally uses a concept called the “accountability margin” instead of the more familiar “profit margin.” And which of the two halves makes more money? Per the Journal, that would be “Agents and Infra” which is projecting about $75 billion in revenue for the first quarter of next year. “Devices and Consumer” is projecting about $15 billion.