Good for country-level field empowerment /**/ĭX is a team whose focus cuts across many different Microsoft product and services groups, and its engineers are tasked with knowing just about everything the company is doing.
Adam Seligman, vice president of developer relations at, thinks this is a great move, as evidenced by this tweet Tuesday: DX (DPE) to KT. Reaction to the move also positive outside Microsoft. It might be nice to get them all marching towards the same very clearly stated goals." "There are so many great and talented people. " has been so historically unfocused and spread thin that a little process may help out," one partner told CRN, speaking on condition of anonymity.
On the plus side, Microsoft has moved DPE/DX around several times in the past 18 months, and partners told CRN having a permanent home under SMSG could help make it more effective. However, a Microsoft spokesperson told CRN that DX employees have been measured using the scorecard system for "years." The problem with scorecards is that it's tough to measure performance for the sort of evangelism and developer outreach work that DX does, the partners said. Yet three Microsoft partners told CRN they're uneasy over what will happen to DX as part of SMSG, where it will be subject to Turner's scorecard system for measuring employee performance, which is widely disliked internally. The DX team seems poised for a bigger role in light of CEO Satya Nadella's goal of getting Microsoft apps running on all kinds of competing devices, which will open new opportunities for third party coders.
Microsoft created DPE in 2001 with a goal of getting software developers excited about building apps using Microsoft tools.
Sometime in the next few weeks, the DX team - which prior to July was known as the Developer and Platform Evangelism group - will move to Microsoft's sales, marketing and services group (SMSG), the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor said Monday.ĭX, which has been under the leadership of Eric Rudder, Microsoft's executive vice president of advanced strategy, will now be reporting to COO Kevin Turner. Microsoft's Developer Experience team (DX), a 13-year old organization that works with the vendor's developer ecosystem partners, is getting a new home.