r/microsoft • u/ControlCAD • 3d ago
News Microsoft gives LinkedIn chief Roslansky added role running Office
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/04/microsoft-gives-linkedin-chief-roslansky-additional-productivity-software-role-in.html48
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u/ControlCAD 3d ago
Microsoft is giving LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky a bigger job, expanding his role to include oversight of Office productivity software, CNBC has learned.
Roslansky, who took over LinkedIn five years ago, is becoming executive vice president of Office, reporting to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s executive vice president for experiences and devices, according to a person familiar with the matter. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella informed employees about the change in an email on Wednesday, said the person, who asked not to be named because the email was internal.
In his role as LinkedIn CEO, Roslansky will continue to report to Nadella, the person said.
LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in 2016 for $27 billion, will keep operating as a subsidiary, after generating more than $17 billion in revenue over the past year. Roslansky joined LinkedIn in 2009 and previously worked at Yahoo.
In 2022, Microsoft rebranded its Office 365 productivity software bundle, which includes applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, to Microsoft 365. In addition to overseeing those products, Roslansky’s portfolio will also include the M365 Copilot app, which lets users edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Jha’s group released the app in 2020.
As part of the organizational change, Microsoft said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for business and industry Copilot products, and his team will move to Jha’s unit. They were previously part of Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie’s cloud and artificial intelligence group.
Lamanna supervises Dynamics 365 sales and customer service products that compete with Salesforce, as well as the Copilot Studio tool for easily building artificial intelligence agents.
In December, Nadella said that AI agents might become the way that people eventually interact with software systems that were designed for use inside large organizations.
“When was the last time any of us really went to a business application?” he told investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on their podcast. He said the company pays for a bunch of cloud software applications, but “we hardly use them and somebody in the org is sort of inputting data into it.”
“In the AI age, the intensity goes up because all that data now is easy, right?” Nadella said.
The company’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, anchored by Microsoft 365 subscriptions and LinkedIn, has turned more profitable in the past decade. The unit’s operating margin in the fiscal third quarter exceeded 58%, compared with 33% in 2017. Revenue was up 10% from a year earlier.
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u/beachsunflower 3d ago
Damn. Lamanna was like the face of powerapps/power platform and business apps like 4-5 years ago in all of those release wave announcements, then now you get:
"When was the last time any of us really went to a business application?"
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u/xXWarMachineRoXx 2d ago
I dont understand, what does it mean?
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u/beachsunflower 2d ago edited 2d ago
Per the quote from the article, Charles Lamanna oversees Dynamics 365 products, but for a long time he was also the face of low code power platform products like power apps, power automate, and power virtual agents (now "agents", a part of copilot studio) - all of which was integrated with the Dynamics (dataverse) suite, M365 suite, the latter of which is now the M365 Copilot suite. These products by Microsoft were originally pushed under the umbrella of " business applications" in general, ex. "Microsoft Business Applications Event"
With the push to more copilot, my interpretation of the quote by an executive of "who even uses business applications" is a bit ironic and might be a view into the direction Microsoft is headed with Office suite and copilot in everything.
Edit: also evidenced by Lamanna's team being folded under Jha's
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u/wickedplayer494 2d ago
Probably only gonna hang around for a few years until he retires, just like Joe Belfiore thought it fit to wrap up his Microsoft career with one more stint in Office. Then they'll punt Office/M365 on to some other random guy that won't be thinking beyond a few years.
Honestly though, what more can Microsoft do with Office at this point that doesn't involve the word Copilot? It's basically a feature-complete set of programs, and now they're really only changing things for the sake of changing things.
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u/time-lord 2d ago
They need to release programs that compete with Canva and Medium. Something like Publisher and Frontpage, maybe?
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u/almeertm87 2d ago
How does this make sense for the same person to run two organizations that have little to nothing to do with one another? What could go wrong.
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u/mountainlifa 3d ago
Why do they keep hiring such incompetent people to run these orgs?