As had been heavily rumoured in recent weeks, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has unveiled a major restructuring at the company's top end, shuffling executives and consolidating some corporate divisions with a view to getting the many facets of MS working together more efficiently.

We are rallying behind a single strategy as one company — not a collection of divisional strategies. Although we will deliver multiple devices and services to execute and monetize the strategy, the single core strategy will drive us to set shared goals for everything we do. We will see our product line holistically, not as a set of islands. We will allocate resources and build devices and services that provide compelling, integrated experiences across the many screens in our lives, with maximum return to shareholders. All parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of core offerings, like Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365 and our EA offer, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and our servers. All parts of the company will contribute to activating high-value experiences for our customers.

The announcement outlines 12 teams in total, but most relevant to Microsoft's games related activities are:

Operating Systems Engineering Group. Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console, to mobile device, to PC, to back-end systems. The core cloud services for the operating system will be in this group.

Devices and Studios Engineering Group. Julie Larson-Green will lead this group and will have all hardware development and supply chain from the smallest to the largest devices we build. Julie will also take responsibility for our studios experiences including all games, music, video and other entertainment.

As head of Microsoft's devices division, 19 year Microsoft veteran Larson-Green has effectively assumed the Xbox and Microsoft Games related responsibilities of the recently departed Don Mattrick.